
Class JBSZ-4ifL 

Book. .^'h f 

CoEyrightN" 



COPntlGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS 



WORKS BY GEORGE JACKSON, B.A. 

THE TEACHING OF JESUS 
One Vol. Crozun Svo, cloth, net $1.25 

This new volume will have increased interest in view of 
Mr. Jackson's recent visit when he added to the already 
widespread fame of his work in Edinburgh. 

Mr. Jackson states his message seriously and simply and 
with the glow that comes of personal conviction. 



THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS 

AND OTHER ADDRESSES 

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A YOUNG MAN'S RELIGION 
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THE OLD METHODISM AND THE 
NEW 

Fcap. ^vo, cloth. 50 cents 



THE 

TEACHING OF JESUS 



BY THE 



REV. GEORGE JACKSON, B.A. 
Author of "A Young Man's Religion," etc. 



^''Whosoever goeth oniuard and abideth not in the teaching of 
Christ, hath not God : he that abideth in the teaching, the same 
hath both the Father and the Son^ — 2 John ix (R. V.). 



NEW YORK 
A.C.ARMSTRONG AND SON 

3 & 5 West i%^^ Street, near 51^1 Avenue 

1903 



■^ 






COPY B, 



Copyright, 1903 

By a. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 



Published, November, 1903 






v3 



TO 

MY CHILDREN 

DORA, KENNETH, BASIL, ARNOLD 

MY WISEST TEACHERS 

IN THE THINGS OF GOD 



PREFACE 

The following chapters are the outcome of an 
attempt to set before a large Sunday evening 
congregation — composed for the most part of 
working men and women — -the teaching of our 
Lord on certain great selected themes. The 
reader will know, therefore, what to look for in 
these pages. If he be a trained Biblical scholar 
he need go no further, for he will find nothing 
here with which he is not already thoroughly 
familiar. On the other hand, the book will not 
be wholly without value even to some of my 
brother-ministers if it serve to convince them 
that a man may preach freely on the greatest 
themes of the gospel, and yet be sure that the 
common people will hear him gladly, if only 
he will state his message at once seriously and 
simply, and with the glow that comes of per- 
sonal conviction. Indeed, one may well 
doubt if there is any other kind of preaching 
that they really care for. 

My indebtedness to other workers in the 
same field is manifold. As far as possible de- 
tailed acknowledgment is made in the foot- 
notes. Wendt's Teaching of Jesus and Bey- 
schlag's Nezv Testament Theology have been 
always at my elbow, though not nearly in such 

vii 



viii The Teaching of Jesus 

continual use as Stevens' Theology of the New 
Testament, a work of which it is impossible to 
speak too highly. Bruce's Kingdom of God, 
Stalker's Christology of Jesus, Harnack's What 
is Christia7iity ? Horton's Teaching of fesus, 
Watson's Mind of the Master, Selby's Ministry 
of the Lord Jesus, and Robertson's Our Lord's 
Teaching (a truly marvellous sixpenny worth), 
have all been laid under contribution, not the 
less freely because I have been compelled to 
dissent from some of their conclusions. Like 
many another busy minister, I am a daily 
debtor to Dr. Hastings and his great Diction- 
ary of the Bible, And, finally, I gladly avail 
myself of this opportunity of expressing once 
more my unceasing obligations to the Rev. 
Professor James Denney, of Glasgow. Now 
that Dr. Dale has gone from us, there is no 
one to whom we may more confidently look 
for a reasonable evangelical theology which 
can be both verified and preached. 

It only remains to add that in these pages 
critical questions are for the most part ignored, 
not because the pressure of the problems which 
they create is unfelt, but because as yet they 
have no place among the certainties which are 
the sole business of the preacher when he 
passes from his study to his pulpit. 

GEORGE JACKSON. 

Edinburgh, 1903. 



CONTENTS 



I 

PAGB 

Introductory i 

Utiltexxiv. 19. 
"A prophet mighty in word before God mid all the people.'** 

Soijn iii. 2. 
** A teacher come from God " 

II 

Concerning God • • • 17 

3(ofjnxvii. II. 
«« Holy Father,** 

III 

Concerning Himself 33 

iUlattijeb xvi. 15. 
" Who say ye that I am V* 

IV 

Concerning His own Death • • • • • 49 

IHarfe X. 45. 

** The Son of Man came » . . to give His life a ransom for 
many.''^ 

ix 



V 



The Teaching of Jesus 



V 

PAGE 

Concerning the Holy Spirit . , , . . 65 

3of)n xiv. 16. 
* ' / will pray the Father, and He shall give you another 
Cof/iforter, that He viay be with you for ever^ even the Spirit 
of truth.'''' 

3a\)X{ xvi. 7, 
" // is expedient for you that I go away : for if I go not away^ 
the Comforter will not come unto you ; bi4t if I go away, I 
will send Him unto you.^'' 

VI 

Concerning the Kingdom of God , , , , 81 

iHattf)ihj vi. ID. 

" Thy kingdom come. Thy ivill be done, as in heaven, so on 

earth.'''' 

VII 
Concerning Man "97 

Eul^C XV. ID. 

" There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one 

sinner that repent eih.'''' 

VIII 

Concerning Sin iii 

Ilukc xi. 2, 4. 

'■'- When ye pray, say. . . . Forgive us our sins,'''* 

IX 

Concerning Righteousness 127 

fflattfjcfaj vi. 33. 
'■^ Seek ye first . . . His righteousness.'* 



Contents 



PAGK 

Concerning Prayer 145 

Plattfjebj vii. 9-1 1. 
*' What man is there of you ^ who, if his son shall ask him for 
a loaf, will give hi/ii a stone ; or if he shall ask for a fish, 
will give him a serpent ? If ye then, being evil, knoiv iioiv 
to give good gifts unto yonr ciiildren^ how much moi-e shall 
your Father ivhich is in heaven give good things to them that 
ask Him ? " 

XI 

Concerning the Forgiveness of Injuries . . .161 

ififlattljfbj xviil. 21, 22. 
*' T/ten came Peter, and said to Him, Lord, how oft shall iny 
brotlier sin against me, and I forgive him ? tmtil seven 
times? Jesus saith unto Jiim, 1 say not unto thee, until 
seven times ; but, until seventy times seven. " 



XII 

Concerning Care , , .177 

fttattfjefaj vi. 25, 31, 34. 

'■^ Be not anxious for your life . . . nor yet for your body. 
. . . Be not anxious, saying. What shall we eat ? or, What 
shall we drink ? . . . Be not anxious for the morrow.''^ 

XIII 

Concerning Money .....,, iqi 

l^ukc xviii. 24, 25. 
** How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the king- 
dom of God I For it is easier for a camel to enter in tJirough 
a needless eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom 
of God.'' 



xii The Teaching of Jesus 



XIV 

PAGE 

Concerning the Second Advent , . . .207 
fHattfjeiD xxiv. 30, 36. 

** They shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of 
heaven with power and great glory. . . . Of that day and 
hour knoweth no one, not eveti the angels of heaven, neither 
the Sony but the Father only^ 



XV 

Concerning the Judgment .*•••• 223 

Mattijfijj XXV. 31-33. 
*' When the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all the 
angels with Him, then shall He sit on the throne of His 
glory : and before Him shall be gathered all the nations : and 
He shall separate them one frotn another, as the shepherd 
separateth the sheep from the goats : and He shall set the 
sheep on His right hand, but the goats on tJie left." 

XVI 

Concerning the Future Life 239 

fHattfje^ vi. 20. 

" Where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where 

thieves do not break through nor steal." 

ilHarfe ix. 48. 

** Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.'' 



INTRODUCTORY 



'O Lord and Master of us all ! 

Whate'er our name or sign, 
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call, 

We test our lives by Thine. 

We faintly hear, we dimly see. 

In differing phrase we pray ; 
But, dim or clear, we own in Thee 

The Light, the Truth, the Way." 

Whittier. 



INTRODUCTORY 

"A prophet mighty in word before God and all the people." — 
Luke xxiv. 19. 

"A teacher come from God." — John iii. 2. 

IN Speaking of the teaching of Jesus it is 
scarcely possible at the present day to avoid 
at least a reference to two other closely-related 
topics, viz. the relation of Christ's teaching to the 
rest of the New Testament, and the trustworthi- 
ness of the Gospels in which that teaching is 
recorded. Adequate discussion of either of these 
questions here and now is not possible ; it must 
suffice to indicate very briefly the direction in 
which, as it appears to the writer, the truth may 
be found. 

First, then, as to the relation of the teaching 
of Jesus to the rest of the New Testament, and 
especially to the Epistles of St. Paul. There can 
be no doubt, largely, I suppose, through the 
influence of the Reformers, that the words of 
Jesus have not always received the attention that 
has been given to the writings of Paul. Nor is 

3 



The Teaching of Jesus 



this apparent misplacing of the accent the wholly 
unreasonable thing which at first sight it may 
seem. After all, the most important thing in the 
New Testament — ^that which saves — is not any- 
thing that Jesus said, but what He did ; not His 
teaching, but His death. This, the Gospels 
themselves being witness, is the culmination and 
crown of Revelation ; and it is this which, in the 
Epistles, and pre-eminently the Epistles of Paul, 
fills so large a place. Moreover, it ought plainly 
to be said that the Church has never been guilty 
of ignoring the words of her Lord in the whole- 
sale fashion suggested by some popular religious 
writers of our day. Really, the Gospels are not 
a discovery of yesterday, nor even of the day 
before yesterday. They have been in the hands 
of the Church from the beginning, and, though 
she has not always valued them according to 
their true and priceless worth, she has never failed 
to number them with the choicest jewels in the 
casket of Holy Scripture. Nevertheless, it may 
be freely granted that the teaching of Jesus has 
not always received its due at the Church's hands. 
"Theology," one orthodox and Evangelical divine 
justly complains, "has done no sort of justice to 
the Ethics of Jesus." ^ But in our endeavour to 
rectify one error on the one side, let us see to it 
that we do not stumble into another and worse 
on the other side. The doctrines of Paul are 
not so much theological baggage, of which the 

^J. Stalker, The Christology of Jesus, p. 22, footnote. 



Introductory 



Church would do well straightway to disencumber 
itself. After all that the young science of Biblical 
Theology has done to reveal the manifold variety 
of New Testament doctrine, the book still remains 
a unity; and the attempt to play off one part of 
it against another — the Gospels against the 
Epistles, or the Epistles against the Gospels — is 
to be sternly resented and resisted. To St. Paul 
himself any such rivalry would have been im- 
possible, and, indeed, unthinkable. There was 
no claim which he made with more passionate 
vehemence than that the message which he 
delivered was not his, but Christ's. ''As touching 
the gospel which was preached by me," he says, 
''neither did I receive it from man, nor was I 
taught it, but it came to me through revelation of 
Jesus Christ." The Spirit who spoke through 
him and his brother apostles was not an alien 
spirit, but the Spirit of Christ, given according to 
the promise of Christ, to make known the things 
of Christ ; so that there is a very true sense in 
which their words may be called ''the final testi- 
mony of Jesus to Himself." "We have the mind of 
Christ," Paul said, and both in the Epistles and the 
Gospels we may seek and find the teaching of Jesus." 

^ " The sources for our knowledge of the actual teaching of 
Jesus do not lie merely in the Gospel accounts, but also in the 
literature of the apostolic age, especially in the Epistles of 
Paul. . . . Even had no direct accounts about Jesus been 
handed down to us, we should still possess, in the apostolic 
literature, a perfectly valid testimony to the historical exist- 
ence and epoch-making significance of Jesus as a teacher." — ■ 
H. H. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, vol. i, p. 28. 



6 The Teaching of Jesus 



It is, however^ with the teaching of Jesus as 
it is recorded in the Gospels that, in these 
chapters, we are mainly concerned. We come, 
therefore to our second question: Can we trust 
the Four Gospels ? And this question must be 
answered in even fewer words than were given 
to the last. As to the external evidence, let us 
hear the judgment of the great German scholar, 
Harnack. Harnack is a critic who is ready to 
give to the winds with both hands many things 
which are dear to us as life itself ; yet this is how 
he writes in one of his most recent works : " Sixty 
years ago David Friedrich Strauss thought that 
he had almost entirely dertroyed the historical 
credibility, not only of the fourth, but also of the 
first three Gospels as well. The historical criti- 
cism of two generations has succeeded in restoring 
that credibility in its main outlines." ^ Wlien, 
from the external, we turn to the internal evidepce, 
we are on incontestable ground. The words oif Jesus 
need no credentials, they carry their own creden- 
tials ; they authenticate themselves. Christian 
men and women reading, e.g., the fourteenth of St. 
John's Gospel say within themselves that if these 
are not the words of Jesus, a greater than Jesus 
is here ; and they are right. The oft-quoted 
challenge of John Stuart Mill is as unanswerable 
to-day as ever it was. *'Tt is of no use to say," 
he declares, "that Christ, as exhibited in the 
Gospels, is not historical, and that we know not 

^ What is Christianity? p. 20. 



Introductory 



how much of what is admirable has been super- 
added by the traditions of His followers. . r . 
Who among His disciples, or among their prose- 
lytes, was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed 
to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character 
revealed in the Gospels?"^ 



Assuming, therefore, without further discussion, 
the essential trustworthiness of the Gospel records, 
let us pass on to consider in this introductory 
chapter some general characteristics of Christ's 
teaching as a whole. 

Mark at the outset Christ's own estimate of 
His words: ''The words that I have spoken unto 
you are spirit, and are life;" "If a man keep My 
word he shall never see death;" "Heaven and 
earth shall pass away, but My words shall not 
pass away ; " " Every one which heareth these 
words of Mine and doeth them " — with him Christ 
said it should be well ; but " every one that 
heareth these words of Mine and doeth them not " 
— upon him ruin should come to the uttermost. 
Sayings like these are very remarkable, for this is 
not the way in which human teachers are wont to 
speak of their own words ; or, if they do so speak, 
this wise world of ours knows better than to take 
them at their own valuation. But the astonishing 
fact in the case of Jesus is that the world has 

^ Three Essays on Religion, p. 253. 



8 The Teaching of Jesus 

admitted His claim. Men who refuse utterly to 
share our faith concerning Him and the significance 
of His life and death, readily give to Him a place 
apart among the great teachers of mankind. I 
have already quoted the judgment of John Stuart 
Mill. " Jesus," says Matthew Arnold, " as He 
appears in the Gospels ... is in the jargon of 
modern philosophy an absolute " ^ — we cannot 
get beyond Him. Such, likewise, is the verdict of 
Goethe : " Let intellectual and spiritual culture 
progress, and the human mind expand, as much 
as it Avill ; beyond the grandeur and the moral 
elevation of Christianity, as it sparkles and shines 
in the Gospels, the human mind will not advance." ' 
It would be easy to multiply testimonies, but it is 
needless, since practically all whose judgment is 
of any account are of one mind. 

But now if, with these facts in our minds, 
and knowing nothing else about the teaching of 
Jesus, we could suppose ourselves turning for the 
first time to the simple record of the Gospels, 
probablv our first feeling would be one of surprise 
that Jesus the Teacher had won for Himself such 
an ascendency over the minds and hearts of men. 
P'or consider some of the facts which the Gospels 
reveal to us. To begin with, this Teacher, un- 
like most other teachers who have influenced 
mankind, contented Himself from first to last 
with merely oral instruction : He left no book ; 

^Literature and Dogma, p. lo. 
^ See Harnack's What is Christianity F p. 4. 



Introductory 



He never wrote, save in the dust of the ground. 
Not only so, but the words of Jesus that have 
been preserved by the evangeHsts are, com- 
paratively speaking, extremely few. .Put them 
all together, they are less by one-half or two- 
thirds than the words which it will be necessary 
for me to use in order to set forth His teaching 
in this little book. And further, the little we 
have is, for the most part, so casual, so un- 
premeditated, so unsystematic in its character. 
Once and again, it is true, we get from the 
Evangelists something approaching what may 
be called a set discourse ; but more often what 
they give us is reports of conversations — 
conversations with His disciples, with chance 
acquaintances, or with His enemies. Sometimes 
we find Him speaking in the synagogues ; but 
He is quite as ready to teach reclining at the 
dinner-table ; and, best of all. He loved to speak 
in the open air, by the wayside, or the lake shore. 
Once, as He stood by the lake of Gennesaret, 
the multitude was so' great that it pressed upon 
Him. Near at hand were two little fishing-boats 
drawn up upon the beach, for the fishermen had 
gone out of them, and were washing their nets. 
" And He entered into one of the boats, which 
was Simon's, and asked him to put out a httle 
from the land. And He sat down and taught 
the multitudes out of the boat." It is all so 
different from what we should have expected ; 
there is about it such an air of artless, homely 



10 The Teaching of Jesus 

simplicity. Finally, we cannot forget that Jesus 
was a Jew speaking to Jews. Son of God 
though He was, He was the son of a Jewish 
mother, trained in a Jewish home, in all things 
the child of His own time and race. Whatever 
else His message may have been, it was, first of all, 
a message to the men of His own day ; therefore, 
of necessity, it was their language He used, 
it was to their needs He ministered, it was their 
sins He condemned. The mould, the tone, the 
colouring of His teaching were all largely deter- 
mined by the life of His country and His time. 

Yet this is He concerning whom all ages cry 
aloud, " Never man spake hke this man." This 
is He before whom the greatest and the wisest 
bow down, saying, " Lord " and '' Master." How 
are we to explain it? Much of the explanation 
lies outside of the scope of our present subject ; but 
if we will turn back to the Gospels again we may 
find at least a partial answer to our question. 

n * 

(i) T said just now that Christ's teaching 
was addressed in the first place to the Jews of 
His own day. Yet the note of universality is 
as unmistakable as are the local tone and 
colouring. Christ may speak as the moment 
suggests, but His words are never for the moment 
only, but for all time. He refused almost sternly 
to go unto any save unto the lost sheep of the 



Introductory 1 1 



house of Israel ; yet the Gospels make it 
abundantly plain that in His own thoughts His 
mission was never limited to the tiny stage 
within which, during His earthly years, He 
confined Himself. " I am the light of the 
world," He said; and in His last great com- 
mission to His disciples He bade them carry 
that light unto the uttermost parts of the earth. 
In the great High-Priestly prayer He intercedes 
not only for His disciples, but for those who 
through their word should believe on Him. " I 
will build My church," He declared, " and the 
gates of Hades shall not prevail against it." 

(2) So, again, too, in regard to the form of 
Christ's sayings; to speak of their artlessness 
and homely simplicity is to tell only a small part 
of the truth concerning them. They are, indeed, 
and especially those spoken in Galilee, and 
reported for the most part in the Synoptists, 
the perfection of popular speech. How the 
short, pithy, sententious sayings cling to the 
memory like burs! Let almost any of them 
be commenced, and as Dr. Stalker says, the 
ordinary hearer can without difficulty finish the 
sentence. Christ was not afraid of a paradox. 
When, e.g., He said, "Whosoever smiteth thee 
on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also," 
He was ready to risk the possibility of being 
misunderstood by some prosaic hearer, that He 
might the more effectually arouse men to a 
neglected duty. His language was concrete, not 



12 The Teaching of Jesus 

abstract; He taught by example and illustra- 
tion; He thought, and taught others to think, 
in pictures. How often is the phrase, *' The 

kingdom of heaven is like unto " on His lips! 

Moreover, His illustrations were always such as 
common folk could best appreciate. The birds 
of the air, the lihes of the field, the lamp on the 
lamp-stand, the hen with her chickens under her 
wings, the servant following the plough, the 
shepherd tending his sheep, the fisherman drawing 
his net, the sower casting his seed into the furrow, 
the housewife baking her bread or sweeping her 
house, — it was through panes of common window- 
glass like these that Christ let in the light upon 
the heaped-up treasures of the kingdom of God. 
No wonder " the common people heard Him 
gladly" ; no wonder they " all hung upon Him 
listening" ; or that they '' came early in the 
morning to Him in the temple to hear Him" ! 
Yet, even in the eyes of the multitude the plain 
homespun of Christ's speech was shot with gleams 
of more than earthly lustre. There mingled — to 
use another figure — with the sweet music of 
those simple sayings a new deep note their ears 
had never heard before : " the multitudes were 
astonished at His teaching; for He taught them 
as one having authority, and not as their scribes." 
It was not the authority of powerful reasoning 
over the intellect, reasoning which we cannot 
choose but obey ; it was the authority of perfect 
spiritual intuition. Christ never speaks as one 



Introductory 13 



giving the results of long and painful gropings 
after truth, but rather as one who is at home in 
the world to which God and the things of the 
spirit belong. He asserts that which He knows, 
He declares that which He has seen. 

(3) Another quality of Christ's words which 
helps us to understand their world-wide influence 
is their winnowedness, their freedom from the chaff 
which, in the words of others, mingles with the 
wholesome grain. The attempt is sometimes made 
to destroy, or, at least, to weaken, our claim for 
Christ as the supreme teacher by placing a few 
selected sayings of His side by side with the words 
of some other ancient thinker or teacher. And 
if they who make such comparisons would put into 
their parallel columns all the words of Jesus and 
all the words of those with whom the comparison 
is made, we should have neither right to complain 
nor reason to fear. Wellhausen puts the truth 
very neatly when he says, " The Jewish scholars 
say, ' All that Jesus said is also to be found in 
the Talmud.' Yes, all, and a great deal besides." ' 
The late Professor G. J. Romanes has pointed out 
the contrast in two respects between Christ and 
Plato. He speaks of Plato as " the greatest re- 
presentative of human reason in the direction of 
spirituality" ; yet he says " Plato is nowhere in 
this respect as compared with Christ." While in 
Plato there are errors of all kinds, *' reaching even 
to absurdity in respect of reason, and to sayings 

^ See A. S. Peake's Guide to Biblical Study, p. 244. 



14 The Teaching of Jesus 

shocking to the moral sense," there is, he declares^ 
in Hteral truth no reason why any of Christ's 
words should ever pass away in the sense of be- 
coming obsolete. And it is this absence from the 
biography of Christ of any doctrines which the 
subsequent growth of human knowledge — whether 
in natural science, ethics, political economy, or 
elsewhere — has had to discount which seems to 
him one of the strongest arguments in favour of 
Christianity/ 

(4) One other quality of Christ's words, which 
specially caught the attention of His hearers \n 
the synagogue at Nazareth, should not be over- 
looked : '' All bare Him witness, and wondered at 
the words of grace which proceeded out of His 
mouth." The reference is, as Dr. Bruce says, ' 
rather to the substance of the discourse than to the 
manner. That there was a peculiar charm in the 
Teacher's manner is undoubted, but it was what 
He said, rather than the way in which He said it 
— the message of grace, rather than the gracious- 
ness of the Messenger — which caused the eyes of 
all in the synagogue to be fastened on Him. He 
had just read the great passage from the Book of 
the prophet Isaiah: 

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, 

Because He anointed Me to preach good tidings to the 

poor. 
He hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, 

^ Thoughts on Religion, p. 157, 
* The Kingdom of God, p. 50. 



Introductory 1 5 



And recovery of sight to the blind, 

To set at liberty them that are bruised, 

To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." 

Then, when the reading was finished, and He had 
given back the roll to the attendant, and was sat 
down, He began to say unto them, " To-day hath 
this Scripture been fulfilled in your ears." This 
was His own programme; this was what He had 
come into the world to do- — to bear the burden of 
the weary and the heavy-laden, to give rest unto 
all who would learn of Him. 

This, then, is the Teacher whose words we are 
to study together in these pages. He Himself is 
saying to us again, " He that hath ears to hear let 
him hear," See that ye refuse not Him that 
speaketh. And again He says, '' Take heed how 
ye hear." Gracious as He is, this Teacher can be 
also very stern. " H any man," He says, " hear 
My sayings and keep them not, I judge him 
not. . . . He that receiveth not My sayings 
hath one that judgeth him ; the word that I 
speak, the same shall judge him in the last day." 
We read of some to whom ''good tidings " were 
preached, whom the word did not profit. Let us 
pray that to writer and readers alike it may prove 
the word of eternal life. 



CONCERNING GOD 



17 



"Our Father, who art in Heaven. 

What meaneth these words? 

God lovingly inviteth us, in this little preface, truly to be- 
lieve in Him, that He is our true Father, and that we are truly 
His children ; so that full of confidence we may more boldly 
call upon His name, even as we see children with a kind 
of confidence ask anything of their parents." — Luther's 
Catechism. 



i8 



II 

CONCERNING GOD 

"Holy Father." — John xvii. ii. 

IT is natural and fitting in an attempt to under- 
stand the teaching of Jesus that we should 
begin with His doctrine of God. For a man's 
idea of God is fundamental, regulative of all his 
religious thinking. As is his God, so will his 
religion be. Given the arc we can complete the 
circle; given a man's conception of God, from 
that we can construct the main outlines of his 
creed. What, then, was the teaching of Jesus 
concerning God? 



In harmony with what has been already 
said in the previous chapter, concerning Christ's 
manner and method as a teacher, we shall find 
little or nothing defined, formal, systematic in 
Christ's teaching on this subject. In those theo- 
logical handbooks which piloted some of us 
through the troublous waters of our early theo- 
logical thinking, one chapter is always occupied 

19 



20 The Teaching of Jesus 

with proofs, more or less elaborate, of the exist- 
ence of Godj and another with a discussion of 
what are termed the Divine " attributes." And 
for the purposes of a theological handbook doubt- 
less this is the right course to take. But this 
was not Christ's way. Search the four Gospels 
through, and probably not one verse can be found 
which by itself would serve as a suitable definition 
for any religious catechism or theological text- 
book. Christ, we must remember, did not, in 
His teaching, begin de novo. He never forgot 
that He was speaking to a people whose were 
the law and the prophets and the fathers ; 
throughout He assumed and built upon the 
accepted truths of Old Testament revelation. 
To have addressed elaborate arguments in proof 
of the existence of God to the Jews would have 
been a mere waste of words; for that faith was 
the very foundation of their national life. Nor 
did Christ speak about the " attributes " of God. 
Again that was not His way. He chose to 
speak in the concrete rather than in the abstract, 
and, therefore, instead of defining God, He shows 
us how He acts. In parable, in story, and in 
His own life He sets God before us, that so 
we may learn what He is, and how He feels 
toward us. 

Christ, I say, built upon the foundation of the 
Old Testament. To understand, therefore, the 
true significance of His teaching about God, we 
must first of all put ourselves at the point of view 



Concerning God 21 

of a devout Jew of His day, and see how far he 
had been brought by that earlier revelation which 
Christ took up and carried to completion. What, 
then, did the Jews know of God before Christ 
came ? 

They knew that God is One, Only, Sovereign: 
" Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one God." 
It had been a hard lesson for Israel to learn. Cen- 
turies had passed before the nation had been 
purged of its idolatries. But the cleansing fires 
had done their work at last, and perhaps the 
world has never seen sterner monotheists than 
were the Pharisees of the time of Christ.^ And 
He whom, thus they worshipped as Sovereign 
they knew also to be holy : " The Holy One of 
Israel," "exalted in righteousness." True, Phari- 
saism had degraded the lofty conceptions of the 
great Hebrew prophets ; it had taught men to 
think of God as caring more for the tithing 
of mint, and anise, and cummin than for the 
weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, 
and faith, making morality merely an affair of 
ceremonies, instead of the concern of the heart 
and the life. But, however Jewish teachers 
might blind themselves and deceive their disciples, 
the Jewish Scriptures still remained to testify of 
God and righteousness, and of the claims which 

^ " Christian apologists," says Dr. Sanday, "have often done 
scant justice to the intensity of this [monotheistic] faith, which 
was utterly disinterested and capable of magnificent self-sacri- 
fice." — Art. "God," Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, vol. ii, 
p. 205. 



22 The Teaching of Jesus 

a righteous God makes upon His people : '' Wash 
you, make you clean ; put away the evil of your 
doings from before Mine eyes ; cease to do evil ; 
learn to do well." Nor, accustomed though we 
are to think of the God of the Old Testament as 
stern rather than kind, were the tenderer elements 
wanting from the Jewish conception of Deity. 
Illustration is not now possible, but a very little 
thought will remind us that it is to the Hebrew 
psalmists and prophets that we owe some of the 
most gracious and tender imagery of the Divine 
love with which the language of devotion has ever 
been enriched. 

Nevertheless, with every desire to do justice 
to a faith which has not always received its due, 
even at Christian hands, it is impossible for us, 
looking back from our loftier vantage-ground, to 
ignore its serious defects and limitations. It was 
an exclusive faith. It magnified the privileges 
of the Jews, but it shut out the Gentiles, God 
might be a Father to Israel, but to no other 
nation under heaven did He stand in any such 
relation. It was the refusal of Christ to recognize 
the barriers which the pride of race had set up 
which more than anything else brought Him into 
conflict with the authorities at Jerusalem. And 
when once from the mind and heart of the Early 
Church the irrevocable word had gone forth, 
" God is no respecter of persons ; but in every 
nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteous- 
ness, is acceptable to Him," the final breach was 



Concerning God 23 

made; no longer could the new faith live with 
the old. And even within the privileged circle 
of Judaism itself men's best thoughts of God and 
of His relation to them were maimed and 
imperfect. He v^as the God of the nation, not 
of the individual. Here and there elect souls like 
the psalmists climbed the heights whereon man 
holds fellowship with God, and spake with Him 
face to face, as a man with his friend. But with 
the people as a whole, even as with their greatest 
prophets, not the individual, but the nation, was 
the religious unit. 

Such was the Old Testament idea of God. 
Now let us return to the teaching of Jesus. And 
at once we discover that Christ let go nothing 
of that earlier doctrine which was of real and 
abiding worth. The God of Jesus Christ is as 
holy, as sovereign — or, to use the modern term — 
as transcendent as the God of the psalmists and 
the prophets. Their favourite name for God was 
" King," and Christ spake much of the " kingdom 
of God." To them God's people were His 
servants, owing to Him allegiance and service 
to the uttermost ; we also, Christ says, are the 
servants of God, to every one of whom He has 
appointed his task, and with whom one day He 
will make a reckoning. But if nothing is lost, 
how much is gained ! It is not merely that in 
Christ's teaching we have the Old Testament 
of God over again with a plus, the new which 
is added has so transformed and transfigured 



24 The Teaching of Jesus 

the old that all is become new. To Jesus 
Christ, and to us through Him, God is " the 
Father." 

It is, of course, well known that Christ was 
not the first to apply this name to God. There 
is no religion, says Max Miiller,^ which is sufficiently 
recorded to be understood that does not, in some 
sense or other, apply the term Father to its Deity. 
Yet this need not concern us, for though the name 
be the same the meaning is wholly different. 
There is no true comparison even between the 
occasional use of the word in the Old Testament 
and its use by Christ. For, though in the Old 
Testament God is spoken of as the Father of 
Israel, it is as the Father of the nation, not of the 
individual, and of that nation only. Even in a 
great saying like that of the Psalmist : 

"Like as a father pitieth his children, 

So the Lord pitieth them that fear Him," 

it is still only Israel that the writer has in view, 
though we rightly give to the words a wider 
application. But there is no need of argument. 
Every reader of the Old Testament knows that 
its central, ruling idea of God is not Fatherhood, 
but Kingship : " The Lord reigneth." Even in 
the Psalms, in which the religious aspiration and 
worship of the ages before Christ find their finest 
and noblest expression, never once is God ad- 
dressed as Father. But when we turn to the 

^ See R. F. Horton's Teaching of Jesus, p. 59. 



Concerning God 25 



Gospels, how great is the contrast! Though not 
even a single psalmist dare look up and say, 
" Father," in St. Matthew's Gospel alone the name 
is used of God more than forty times. Fatherhood 
now is no longer one attribute among many; it is 
the central, determining idea in whose revealing 
light all other names of God — Creator, Sovereign, 
Judge — must be read and interpreted. And the 
God of Jesus Christ is the Father, not of one race 
only, but of mankind; not of mankind only, but 
of men. 

II 

It was indeed a great and wonderful gospel 
which Christ proclaimed — so great and wonder- 
ful that all our poor words tremble and sink 
down under the weight of the truth they vainly 
seek to express. By what means has Christ 
put us into possession of such a truth? How 
have we come to the full assurance of faith 
concerning the Divine Fatherhood? In two 
ways: by His teaching and by His life; by what 
He said and by what He did. And once more a 
paragraph must perforce do, as best it can, the 
work of an essay. 

To the ear and heart of Christ all nature 
spoke of the love and care of God. " Behold the 
birds of the heaven," He said ; " they sow not, 
neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and 
your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye 
of much more value than they ? " And again He 



26 The Teaching of Jesus 

said, " Consider the lilies of the field " — not the 
pale, delicate blossom we know so well, but " the 
scarlet martagon " which " decks herself in red and 
gold to meet the step of summer " — " Consider 
the lilies of the field, how they grow ; they toil 
not, neither do they spin ; yet I say unto you 
that even Solomon, in all his glory, was not 
arrayed like one of these. But if God doth so 
clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and 
to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He not 
much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" Or, 
He bade men look into their own hearts and learn. 
''God's possible is taught by His world's loving;" 
from what is best within ourselves we may learn 
what God Himself is like. Once Christ spoke to 
shepherds : '' What man of you, having a hundred 
sheep, and having lost one of them" — how the 
faces in the little crowd would light up, and their 
ears drink in the gracious argument ! You care 
for your sheep, but how much better is a man 
than a sheep? If you would do so much for 
them, will God do less for you? And once the 
word went deeper still, as He spoke to fathers : 
" What man is there of you, who, if his son shall 
ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone ; or if 
he shall ask for a fish will give him a serpent? 
If ye then, being evil, know how to give good 
gifts unto your children, how much more shall 
your Father which is in heaven give good things 
to them that ask Him ? " Why, Christ asks, why 
do you not let your own hearts teach you? If 



Concerning God 27 



love will not let you mock your child, think 
you, will God be less good than you your- 
selves are ? 

But more even than by His words did Christ 
by His life reveal to us the Father. " He that 
hath seen Me," He said to Philip, " hath seen the 
Father." In what He was and did, in His life 
and in His death, we read what God is. We 
follow Him from Bethlehem to Nazareth, from 
Nazareth to Gennesaret, from Gennesaret to Jeru- 
salem, to the Upper Room, to Gethsemane, and 
to Calvary, and at every step of the way He says 
to us, " He that hath seen Me hath seen the 
Father." We are with Him at the marriage feast 
at Cana of Galilee, and in the midst of the 
mourners by the city gate at Nain ; we see Him 
as He takes the little children into His arms and 
lays His hands upon them and blesses them ; we 
hear His word to her that was a sinner in the 
house of Simon the Pharisee ; we stand with 
John and with Mary under the shadow of the 
Cross; and still, always and everywhere, He is 
saying to us, " He that hath seen Me hath seen 
the Father; if ye had known Me ye should have 
known my Father also." Within the sweep of 
this great word the whole life of Jesus lies ; there 
is nothing that He said or did that does not more 
fully declare Him whom no man hath seen at any 
time. To read '' that sweet story of old " is to 
put our hand on the heart of God; it is to know 
the Father. 



28 Tlie Teaching of Jesus 

III 

" Yes," says some one, " it is a beautiful creed 
— if only one could believe it." Christ took 
the birds and the flowers for His text, and 
preached of the love of God for man, but is that 
the only sermon the birds and flowers preach to 
us? Does not "nature, red in tooth and claw 
with ravine," shriek against our creed? And 
when we turn to human life the tragedy deepens. 
Why, if Love be law, is the world so full of pain? 
Why do the innocent suffer? Why are our 
hearts made to sicken every day when we take 
up our morning paper? Why does not God end 
the haunting horror of our social ills? They are 
old-world questions which no man can answer. 
Yet will I not give up my faith, and I will tell 
you why. " I cannot see," Huxley once wrote to 
Charles Kingsley, "one shadow or tittle of evidence 
that the great unknown underlying the phenomena 
of the universe, stands to us in the relation of a 
Father — loves us, and cares for us as Christianity 
asserts." And, perhaps, if I looked for evidence 
only where Huxley looked, I should say the 
same ; but I have seen Jesus, and that has made 
all the difiference. It is He, and He alone, who 
has made me sure of God. He felt, as I have 
never felt, the horrid jangle and discord of this 
world's life ; sin and suffering tore His soul as no 
soul of man was ever torn; He both saw suffering 
innocence and Himself suffered being innocent, 



Concerning God 29 



and yet to the end He knew that love was 
through all and over all, and died with the name 
'' Father " upon His lips. And, therefore, though 
the griefs and graves of men must often make me 
dumb, I will still dare to believe with Jesus that 
God is good and " Love creation's final law." 

But while thus, on the one hand, we use 
Christ's doctrine of God to our comfort, let us 
take care lest, on the other hand, we abuse it to 
our hurt and undoing. There has scarcely ever 
been a time when the Church has not suffered 
through " disproportioned thoughts " of God. To- 
day our peril is lest, in emphasizing the Divine 
Fatherhood, we ignore the Divine Sovereignty, 
and make of God a weak, indulgent Eli, without 
either purpose or power to chastise His wilful 
and disobedient children. " God is good ; God 
is love ; why then should we fear ? Will He not 
deal tenderly with us and with all men, forgiving 
us even unto seventy times seven ? " The argu- 
ment is true — and it is false. As an assurance 
to the penitent and to the broken in heart, it is 
true, blessedly true; in any other sense it is false 
as hell. He whom Christ called, and taught us 
to call " Father," He also called '' Holy Father " 
and '' Righteous Father." Have we forgotten 
Peter's warning — we do not need to ask at 
whose lips he learned it — " If ye call on Him 
as Father . . . pass the time of your sojourning 
in fear." This is no contradiction of the doctrine 
of Fatherhood ; strictly speaking, it is not even 



30 Tlic Teaching of Jesus 

a modification of it ; rather is it an essential part 
of any true and complete statement of it. Peter 
does not mean God is a Father, and He is also to 
be feared; that is to miss the whole point of his 
words; what he means is, God is a Father, and, 
therefore, He is to be feared ; the fear follows 
necessarily on the true idea of Fatherhood. Ah, 
brethren, if we understood Peter and Peter's Lord 
aright, we should be not the less, but the more 
anxious about our sins, because we have learnt to 
call God " Father." " Evil," it has been well 
said, " is a more terrible thing to the family than 
to the state." ^ Acts which the law takes no 
cognizance of a father dare not, and cannot, pass 
by; what the' magistrate may dismiss with light 
censure he must search out to its depths. The 
judgment of a father — there is no judgment like 
that. And if it is a fearful thing to fall into the 
hands of the living God, for him who all his life 
through has set himself against the Divine law 
and love, it is a still more fearful thing because 
those hands are the hands of a Father. 

But this is not the note on which to close a 
sermon on the Fatherhood of God. Let us go 
l^ack to a chapter from which, though I have only 
once quoted its words, we have never been far 
away — the fifteenth of St. Luke, with its three- 
fold revelation of the seeking love of God. The 
parables of the chapter are companion pictures, 
and should be studied together in the light of the 

* A. M. Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, p. 244. 



Concerning God 31 

circumstances which were their common origin. 
" The Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, 
This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them." 
These parables are Christ's answer. Mark how 
He justifies Himself. He might have pleaded the 
need of those whom the Pharisees and scribes 
had left alone in their wretchedness and sin, but 
of this He says nothing; His thoughts are all of 
the need of God. The central thought in each 
parable is not what man loses by his sin, but 
what God loses. iVs the shepherd misses his lost 
sheep, and the woman her lost coin, and the 
father his lost son, so, Christ says, we are all 
missed by God until, with our heart's love, we 
satisfy the hunger of His. The genius of a prose 
poet shall tell us the rest. We have all read of 
Lachlan Campbell and his daughter Flora, how 
she went into the far country, and what brought 
her home again. 'Tt iss weary to be in London" 
— this was Flora's story as she told it to Marget 
Howe when she was back again in the glen — " it 
iss weary to be in London and no one to speak 
a kind word to you, and I will be looking at the 
crowd that is always passing, and I will not see 
one kent face, and when I looked In at the lighted 
windows the people were all sitting round the 
table, but there was no place for me. Millions 
and millions of people, and not one to say 
' Flora,' and not one sore heart if I died that 
night." Then one night she crept into a church 
as the people were singing. " The sermon wass 



32 ~ The Teaching of Jesus 

on the Prodigal Son, but there is only one word 
I remember. ' You are not forgotten or cast off/ 
the preacher said: 'you are missed.' Sometimes 
he will say, ' If you had a plant, and you had 
taken great care of it, and it was stolen, would 
you not miss it?' And I will be thinking of my 
geraniums, and saying 'Yes' in my heart. And 
then he will go on, ' If a shepherd wass counting 
his sheep, and there wass one short, does be not 
go out to the hill to seek for it ? ' and I will see 
my father coming back with that lamb that lost 
its mother. My heart wass melting within me, 
but he will still be pleading, ' If a father had a 
child, and she left her home and lost herself in 
the wicked city, she will still be remembered in 
the old house, and her chair will be there,' and I 
will be seeing my father all alone with the Bible 
before him, and the dogs will lay their heads on 
his knee, but there iss no Flora. So I slipped 
out into the darkness and cried, ' Father,' but I 
could not go back, and I knew not what to do. 
But this wass ever in my ear, ' missed,' " — and 
this was the word that brought her back to home 
and God.^ 

^ On the subject of this chapter see especially G. B. Stevens' 
Theology of the Nezv Testament, chap. vi. 



CONCERNING HIMSELF 



33 



•* Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was 
Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no 
getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable." 

John Duncan, Colloquia Peripatetica. 



34 



Ill 

CONCERNING HIMSELF 

«* tVho say ye that I am ? " — Matt. xvi. 15. 

I 

THIS was our Lord's question to His first 
disciples ; and thi.s, by the mouth of Simon 
Peter, was their answer : " Thou art the Christ, the 
Son of the living God." And in all ages this has 
been the answer of the Holy Catholic Church 
throughout all the world. In the days of New 
Testament Christianity no other answer was known 
or heard. The Church of the apostles had its 
controversies, as we know, controversies in which 
the very life of the Church was at stake. Division 
crept in even among the apostles themselves. But 
concerning Christ they spoke with one voice, they 
proclaimed one faith. The early centuries of the 
Christian era were centuries of keen discussion 
concerning the Person of our Lord ; but the dis- 
cussions sprang for the most part from the difficulty 
of rightly defining the true relations of the Divine 
and the human in the one Person, rather than 

35 



36 The Teaching of Jesus 

from the denial of His Divinity ; and, as Mr. 
Gladstone once pointed out, since the fourth 
century the Christian conception of Christ has 
remained practically unchanged. Amid the fierce 
and almost ceaseless controversies which have 
divided and sometimes desolated Christendom, 
and which, alas ! still continue to divide it, the 
Church's testimony concerning Christ has never 
wavered. The Greek Church, the Roman Catholic 
Church, the various Protestant Churches, Luther- 
ans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, 
Methodists, Christian men and women out of 
every tribe and tongue and people and nation, — 
all unite to confess the glory of Christ in the 
words of the ancient Creed : " I believe in one 
Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, 
begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of 
God, Light of Light, Very God of very God." 

This, beyond all doubt, has been and is the 
Christian way of thinking about Christ. But now 
the question arises. Was this Christ's way of 
thinking about Himself? Did He Himself claim 
to be one with God t or, is it only we, His adoring 
disciples, who have crowned Him with glory and 
honour, and given Him a name that is above 
every name? To those of us who have been 
familiar with the New Testament ever since we 
could read, the question may appear so simple as 
to be almost superfluous. Half-a-dozen texts leap 
to our lips in a moment by way of answer. Did 
He not claim to be the Messiah in whom Old 



Concerning Himself 37 

Testament history and prophecy found their fulfil- 
ment and consummation ? Did He not call Him- 
self the Son of God, saying, " The Father hath 
given all judgment unto the Son ; that all may 
honour the Son, even as they honour the Father " ? 
Did He not declare, " I and My Father are one " ? 
and again, " All things have been delivered unto 
Me of My Father : and no one knoweth the Son, 
save the Father ; neither doth any know the 
Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the 
Son willeth to reveal Him " ? And when one of 
the Twelve bowed down before Him, saying, " My 
Lord and my God," did He not accept the homage 
as though it were His by right ? What further 
need, then, have we of witnesses ? Is it not 
manifest that the explanation of all that has been 
claimed for Christ, from the days of the apostles 
until now, is to be found in what Christ claimed 
for Himself? 

This is true ; nevertheless it may be well to re- 
mind ourselves that Christ Himself did not thrust 
the evidence on His disciples in quite this whole- 
sale, summary fashion. It is an easy thing for us 
to scour the New Testament for " proof-texts," and 
then, when they are heaped together at our feet 
like a load of bricks, to begin to build our theo- 
logical systems. But Peter and Thomas and the 
other disciples could not do this. The revelation 
which we possess in its completeness was given to 
them little by little as they were able to receive it. 
And the moment we begin to study the life of 



38 The Teaching of Jesus 

Jesus, not in isolated texts, but as day by day it 
passed before the eyes of the Twelve, we cannot 
fail to observe the remarkable reserve which, dur- 
ing the greater part of His ministry, He exercised 
concerning Himself. When first His disciples 
heard His call and followed Him, He was to them 
but a humble peasant teacher, who had flung about 
their lives a wondrous spell which they could no 
more explain than they could resist. Indeed, 
there is good reason to believe, as Dr. Dale has 
pointed out,^ that the full discovery of Christ's 
Divinity only came to the apostles after His 
Resurrection from the dead. At first, and for long, 
Christ was content to leave them with their poor, 
imperfect thoughts. He never sought to carry 
their reason by storm ; rather He set Himself to 
win them^mind, heart, and will — by slow siege. 
He lived before them and with them, saying little 
directly about Himself, and yet always revealing 
Himself, day by day training them, often perhaps 
unconsciously to themselves, "to trust Him with 
the sort of trust which can be legitimately given 
to God only." ^ And when at last the truth was 
clear, and they knew that it was the incarnate 
Son of God who had companied with them, their 
faith was the result not of this or that high claim 
which He had made for Himself, but rather of 
"the sum-total of all His words and works, the 
united and accumulated impression of all He was 

1 Christian Doctrine^ p. 77' 
2 Bishop Gore, Bainpton Lectures ^ 189 1, p. 1 3. 



Concerning Himself 39 

and did " upon their sincere and receptive 
souls.^ 

Are there not many of us to-day who would 
do well to seek the same goal by the same path? 
We have listened, perhaps, to other men's argu- 
ments concerning the Divinity of our Lord, con- 
scious the while how little they were doing for 
us. Let us listen to Christ Himself Let us 
put ourselves to school with Him, as these first 
disciples did, and suffer Him to make His own 
impression upon us. And if ours be sincere and 
receptive souls as were theirs, from us also He 
shall win the adoring cry, " My Lord and my 
God." Let us note, then, some of the many 
ways in which Christ bears witness concerning 
Himself In a very true sense all His sayings 
are " self- portraitures." Be the subject of His 
teaching what it may, He cannot speak of it 
without, in some measure at least, revealing His 
thoughts concerning Himself; and it is this in- 
direct testimony whose significance I wish now care- 
fully to consider. 

II 

Observe, in the first place, how Christ speaks 
of God and of His own relation to Him. 
He called Himself, as we have already noted, 
" the Son of God." Now, there is a sense in 
which all men are the sons of God, for it is to 
God that all men owe their life. And there is. 

* J. D^nney, Studies in Theology^ p. 25. 



40 The Teaching of Jesus 

further, as the New Testament has taught us, 
another and deeper sense in which men who 
are not may " become " the sons of God, through 
faith in Christ. But Christ's consciousness of 
Sonship is distinct from both of these, and cannot 
be explained in terms of either. He is not "'a 
son of God " — one among many — -He is " the 
son of God," standing to God in a relationship 
which is His alone. Hence we find — and we 
shall do well to mark the marvellous accuracy 
and self-consistency of the Gospels in this matter 
— that while Jesus sometimes speaks of " the 
Father," and sometimes of " My Father," and 
sometimes, again, in addressing His disciples, of 
^^ your Father," never does He link Himself with 
them so as to call God " our Father." Nowhere 
does the distinction, always present to the mind 
of Christ, find more striking expression than in 
that touching scene in the garden in which the 
Risen Lord bids Mary go unto His brethren and 
say unto them, " I ascend unto My Father and 
your Father, and My God and your God." 

This sense of separateness is emphasized when 
we turn to the prayers of Christ. And in this 
connection it is worthy of note that though Christ 
has much to say concerning the duty and blessed- 
ness of prayer, and Himself spent much time in 
prayer, yet never, so far as we know, did He ask 
for the prayers of others. " Simon, Simon, be- 
hold, Satan asked to have you, that he might sift 
you as wheat : but I made supplication for thee^ 



Concerning Himself 41 

that thy faith fail not." So did Jesus pray for 
His disciples ; but we never read that they prayed 
for Him, or that He asked for Himself a place 
in their prayers. How significant the silence is 
we learn when we turn to the Epistles of St. 
Paul and to the experience of the saints. 
" Brethren, pray for us " — this is the token in 
almost every Epistle. In the long, lone fight of 
life even the apostle's heart would have failed 
him had not the prayers of unknown friends 
upheld him as with unseen hands. There is no 
stronger instinct of the Christian heart than the 
plea for remembrance at the throne of God. 
" Pray for me, will you ? " we cry, when man's 
best aid seems as a rope too short to help, yet 
long enough to mock imprisoned miners in their 
living tamb. But the cry which is so often ours 
was never Christ's. 

It has further been remarked that, intimate as 
was Christ's intercourse with His disciples. He 
never joined in prayer with them.^ He prayed 
in their presence, He prayed for them, but never 
with them. " It came to pass, as He was pray- 
ing in a certain place, that when He ceased, one 
of His disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us 
to pray, even as John also taught his disciples. 

And He said unto them. When ye pray, say ." 

Then follows what we call "The Lord's Prayer." 

^ For an admirable slatement of the argument of this paragraph 
see D. W. Forrest's Christ of History and Experience ^ chap. i. and 
note 4, p. 385, 



42 The Teaching of Jesus 

But, properly speaking, this was not the Lord's 
prayer ; it was the disciples' prayer : " When ye 

pray, say ." And when we read the prayer 

again, we see why it could not be His. How 
could He who knew no sin pray, saying, " For- 
give us our sins " ? The true " Lord's Prayer " 
is to be found in the seventeenth chapter of St. 
John's Gospel. And throughout that prayer the 
holy Suppliant has nothing to confess, nothing 
to regret. He knows that the end is nigh, but 
there are no shadows in His retrospect ; of all 
that is done there is nothing He could wish 
undone or done otherwise. " I glorified Thee 
on the earth, having accomplished the work 
which Thou hast given Me to do." It is so 
when He comes to die. Among the Seven Words 
from the Cross we are struck by one significant 
omission : the dying Sufferer utters a cry of 
physical weakness — " I thirst " — but He makes 
no acknowledgment of sin ; He prays for the 
forgiveness of others — " Father, forgive them : for 
they know not what they do" — He asks none 
for Himself The great Augustine died with the 
penitential Psalms hung round his bed. Fifty or 
sixty times, it is said, did sweet St. Catharine of 
Siena cry upon her deathbed, Peccavi, Domine 
iniserere mei, " Lord, I have sinned : have mercy 
on me." But in all the prayers of Jesus, whether 
in life or in death, He has no pardon to ask, no 
sins to confess. 

We are thus brought to the fact upon which 



Concerning Himself 43 

of recent years so much emphasis has been justly 
laid, namely, that nowhere throughout the Gospels 
does Christ betray any consciousness of sin. 
" Which of you," He said, " convicteth Me of 
sin ? " And no man was able, nor is any man 
now able, to answer Him a word. But the all- 
important fact is not so much that they could 
not convict Him of sin ; He could not convict 
Himself. Yet it could not be that He was self- 
deceived. " He knew what was in man ; " He 
read the hearts of others till, like the Samaritan 
woman, they felt as though He knew all things 
that ever they had done. Was it possible, then, 
that He did not know Himself? Not only so, 
but the law by which He judged Himself was not 
theirs, but His. And what that was, how high, 
how searching, how different from the low, con- 
ventional standards which satisfied them, we who 
have read His words and His judgments know 
full well. Nevertheless, He knew nothing against 
Himself; as no man could condemn Him neither 
could He condemn Himself. Looking up to 
heaven. He could say, " I do always the things 
that are pleasing to Him." ^ This is not the 
language of sinful men ; it is not the language 
of even the best and holiest of men. Christ is as 
separate from " saints " as He is from " sinners." 

1 Cp. Denney's note on St. Paul's description of Christ, " Him 
who knew no sin," in 2 Cor. v. 21 : "The Greek negative (/xr?), 
as Schmiedel remarks, implies that this is regarded as the verdict 
of some one else than the writer. It was Christ's own verdict upon 
Himself." 



44 The Teachmg of Jesus 

The greatest of Hebrew prophets cries, " Woe is 
me ! for I am undone ; because I am a man of 
unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of 
unclean lips." The greatest of Christian apostles 
laments, " O wretched man that I am ! who shall 
deliver me out of the body of this death ? " Even 
the holy John confesses, " If we say that we have 
no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not 
in us." It is one of the commonplaces of Chris- 
tian experience that the holier men become the 
more intense and poignant becomes the sense of 
personal shortcoming. " We have done those 
things which we ought not to have done ; we 
have left undone those things which we ought to 
have done : " among all the sons of men there is 
none, who truly knows himself, who dare be 
silent when the great confession is made — none 
save the Son of Man ; for He, it has well been 
said, was not the one thing which we all are ; He 
was not a sinner. 

This consciousness of separateness runs through 
all that the evangelists have told us concerning 
Christ. When e.g. He is preaching He never 
associates Himself, as other preachers do, with His 
hearers ; He never assumes, as other preachers must, 
that His words are applicable to Himself equally 
with them. We exhort ; He commands. We 
say, like the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
" Let us go on unto perfection" ; He says, " Ye shall 
be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." 
We speak as sinful men to sinful men, standing 



Concerning Himself 45 

by their side ; He speaks as from a height, as one 
who has already attained and is already made 
perfect. Or, the contrast may be pointed in 
another way. We all know what it is to be 
haunted by misgivings as to the wisdom of some 
course which, under certain trying circumstances, 
we have taken. We had some difficult task to 
perform — to withstand (let us say) a fellow- 
Christian to his face, as Paul withstood Peter at 
Antioch ; and we did the unpleasant duty as best 
we knew how, honestly striving not only to speak 
the truth but to speak it in love. And yet when 
all was over we could not get rid of the fear that 
we had not been as firm or as kindly as we should 
have been, that, if only something had been which 
was not, our brother might have been won. There 
is a verse in Paul's second letter to the Church at 
Corinth which illustrates exactly this familiar kind 
of internal conflict. Referring to the former letter 
which he had sent to the Corinthians, and in which 
he had sharply rebuked them for their wrong-doing, 
he says, " Though I made you sorry with my 
epistle, I do not regret it, though I did regret" — 
a simple, human touch we can all understand. 
Yes ; but when did Jesus hesitate and, as it were, 
go back upon Himself after this fashion ? He 
passed judgment upon men and their ways with 
the utmost freedom and confidence ; some, such as 
the Pharisees, He condemned with a severity which 
almost startles us ; towards others, such as she 
" that was a sinner," He was all love and tender- 



46 The Teaching of Jesus 

ness. Yet never does He speak as one who fears 
lest either in His tenderness or His severity He 
has gone too far. His path is always clear ; He 
enters upon it without doubt ; He looks back upon 
it without misgiving. 

This contrast between Christ and all other men, 
as it presented itself to His own consciousness, 
may be illustrated almost indefinitely. His fore- 
runners the prophets were the servants of God ; 
He is His Son. All other men are weary and in 
need of rest ; He has rest and can give it. All 
others are lost ; He is not lost, He is the shepherd 
sent to seek the lost. All others are sick ; He is 
not sick, He is the physician sent to heal the sick. 
All others will one day stand at the bar of God ; 
but He will be on the throne to be their Judge. 
All others are sinners — this is the great, final dis- 
tinction into which all others run up — He is the 
Saviour. When at the Last Supper He said, 
" This is My blood of the covenant which is shed 
for many unto remission of sins " ; and again, when 
He said, " The Son of Man came to give His life 
a ransom for many," He set Himself over against 
all others, the one sinless sacrifice for a sinful 
world. 

There is in Edinburgh a Unitarian church which 
bears carved on its front these words of St. Paul . 
" There is one God, and one mediator between 
God and man, the man Christ Jesus." I say 
nothing as to the fitness of any of Paul's words 
for such a place — perhaps we can imagine what 



Concerning Himself 47 

he would have said ; I pass over any questions of 
interpretation that might very justly be raised ; I 
have only one question to ask : Why was the 
quotation not finished ? Paul only put a comma 
where they have put a full stop ; the next words 
are: " Who gave Himself a ransom for aW But 
how could He do that if He was only " the man 
Christ Jesus " ? 

" No man can save his brother's soul, 
Nor pay his brother's debt," 

and how could He, how dare He, think of His 
life as the ransom for our forfeited lives, if He 
were only one like unto ourselves ? There is but 
one explanation which does really explain all that 
Christ thought and taught concerning Himself; it 
is that given by the first disciples and re-echoed by 
every succeeding generation of Christians — 

"THOU ART THE KING OF GLORY, O CHRIST. 

THOU ART THE EVERLASTING SON OF THE FATHER.*' 



CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH 



49 



" While there is life in thee, in this death alone place thy 
trust, confide in nothing else besides ; to this death commit thyself 
altogether ; with this shelter thy whole self ; with this death array 
thyself from head to foot. And if the Lord thy God will judge 
thee, say. Lord, between Thy judgment and me I cast the death 
of our Lord Jesus Christ ; no otherwise can I contend with Thee. 
And if He say to thee, Thou art a sinner, say, Lord, I stretch 
forth the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my sins and 
Thee. If He say. Thou art worthy of condemnation, say. Lord, I 
set the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my evil deserts 
and Thee, and His merits I offer for those merits which I ought 
to have, but have not of my own. If He say that He is wroth with 
thee, say, Lord, I lift up the death of our Lord Jesus Christ 
between Thy wrath and me." — Anselm. 



50 



IV 
CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH 

^* The Son of Man came . . . to give His life a ransom for 
many." — Mark x. 45. 

THE death of Jesus Christ has always held 
the foremost place in the thought and 
teaching of the Church. When St. Paul writes 
to the Corinthians, " I delivered unto you first of 
all that which also I received, how that Christ 
died for our sins according to the Scriptures," 
he is the spokesman of every Christian preacher 
and teacher, of the missionary of the twentieth 
century no less than of the first. It is with 
some surprise, therefore, we discover when we 
turn to the teaching of Jesus Himself, that He 
had so little to say concerning a subject of which 
His disciples have said so much. It is true that 
the Gospels, without exception, relate the story 
of Christ's death with a fulness and detail which, 
in any other biography, would be judged absurdly 
out of proportion. But this, it is said, reveals 
the mind of the evangelists rather than the mind 
of Christ. And those who love that false com- 

51 



52 The Teaching of Jesus 

parison between the Gospels and the Epistles 
of which so much is heard to-day, have not been 
slow to seize upon this apparent discrepancy as 
another example of the way in which the Church 
has misunderstood and misinterpreted the simple 
message of the Galilean Prophet. 

But, in the first place, as I will show in a 
moment, the contrast between the Gospels and 
Epistles in this matter is by no means so sharply 
defined as is often supposed. And further, grant- 
ing that there is a contrast — that what in the 
Gospels is only a hint or suggestion, becomes in 
the Epistles a definite and formal statement- — it 
is one which admits of a simple and immediate 
explanation. Christ — this was Dr. Dale's way 
of putting it — did not come to preach the gospel ; 
He came that there might be a gospel to preach. 
This must not be pressed so far as to imply that 
it is only the death and not also the life of Christ 
that has any significance for us to-day ; but if 
that death had any significance in it at all, if it 
was anything more to Him than death is to us, 
if it stood in any sort of relation to us men 
and our salvation, manifestly the teaching which 
should make this plain would more fittingly 
follow than precede the death. And they at 
least who accept Christ's words, " I have yet 
many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear 
them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of 
truth, is come. He shall guide you into all truth " 
— they, I say, who accept these words can find 



Concerning His own Death t^^i 

no difficulty in believing that part of the revela- 
tion which it was the good pleasure of the Father 
to give to us in His Son, came through the lips 
of men who spake as they were moved by the 
Holy Spirit. Moreover, when we turn to the 
Gospels we see at once that the interpretation 
of Christ's death was just one of those things 
which the disciples as yet were unable to bear. 
The point is so important that it is worth while 
dwelling upon it for a moment. So far were the 
Twelve from being able to understand their Lord's 
death, that they would not even believe that He 
was going to die. " Be it far from Thee, Lord," 
cried Peter, when Christ first distinctly foretold 
His approaching end ; " this shall never be unto 
Thee." When, at another time, He said unto 
His disciples, " Let these words sink into your 
ears ; for the Son of Man shall be delivered up 
into the hands of men," St. Luke adds, " But 
they understood not this saying." And again, 
after another and similar prophecy, the evangelist 
writes with significant reiteration, " They under- 
stood none of these things ; and this saying was 
hid from them, and they perceived not the things 
that were said." So was it all through those 
last months of our Lord's life. His thoughts 
were not their thoughts, neither were His ways 
their ways. They followed Him as He pressed 
along the highway. His face steadfastly set to 
go up to Jerusalem, but they could not under- 
stand Him. Why, if as He had said, death 



54 ^/^^ Teaching of Jesus 

waited Him there, did He go to seek it ? Think 
what utter powerlessness to enter even a little 
way into His thoughts is revealed in a scene 
like this : Two of His disciples, James and 
John, came to Him to ask Him that they might 
sit, one on His right hand, and one on His left 
hand, in His glory. Jesus said unto them, " Ye 
know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink 
the cup that I drink } or to be baptized with 
the baptism that I am baptized with } " And 
they said unto Him, " We are able." What 
could Jesus do with ignorance like this — ignor- 
ance that knew not its own ignorance ? He 
could be " sorry for their childishness " ; but how 
could He show them the mystery of His Passion ? 
What could He do but wait until the Cross, 
and the empty grave, and the gift of Pente- 
cost had done their revealing and enlightening 
work } 

At the same time, as I have already pointed 
out, it is altogether a mistake to suppose that 
Christ has left us on this subject wholly to the 
guidance of others. From the very beginning 
of His ministry the end was before Him, and 
as it drew nearer He spoke of it continually. 
At first He was content to refer to it in language 
purposely vague and mysterious. Just as a 
mother who knows herself smitten with a 
sickness which is unto death, will sometimes 
try by shadowed hints to prepare her children 
for what is coming, while yet she veils its 



Concerning His own Death 55 

naked horror from their eyes, so did Jesus with 
His disciples. " Can the sons of the bride- 
chamber fast," He asked once, '* while the 
bridegroom is with them ? . . . But the days 
will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken 
away from them, and then will they fast in 
that day." But from the time of Peter's great 
confession at Caesarea Philippi all reserve was 
laid aside, and Christ told His disciples plainly 
of the things which were to come to pass : 
"From that time began Jesus to show unto 
His disciples, how that He must go unto 
Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders 
and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, 
and the third day be raised up." And if we 
will turn to any one of the first three Gospels, 
we shall find, as Dr. Denney says, that that 
which " characterized the last months of our 
Lord's life was a deliberate and thrice-repeated 
attempt to teach His disciples something about 
His death." -^ Let me try, very briefly, to set 
forth some of the things which He said. 



First of all, then, Christ died as a faithful 
witness to the truth. Like the prophets and 
the Baptist before Him, whose work and whose 
end were so often in His thoughts, He preached 
righteousness to an unrighteous world, and 

1 The Death of Christ, p. 28. 



56 The Teaching of Jesus 

paid with His life the penalty of His daring. 
That is the very lowest view which can be 
taken of His death. No Unitarian, no un- 
believer, will deny that Jesus died as a good 
man, choosing rather the shame of the Cross 
than the deeper shame of treason to the truth. 
And thus far Christ is an example to all who 
follow Him. In one sense His cross -bearing 
was all His own, a mystery of suffering and 
death into which no man can enter. But in 
another sense, as St. Peter tells us, He has left 
us by His sufferings an example that we should 
follow His steps. It is surely a significant 
fact that the words which immediately follow 
Christ's first distinct declaration of His death 
are these, " If any man would come after Me, 
let him deny himself, and take up his cross 
and follow Me." His death was the supreme 
illustration of a law which binds us, the 
servants, even as it bound Him, the Master. 
In the path of every true man there stands 
the cross which he must bear, or be true no 
more. Let no one grow impatient and say this 
is no more than the fringe of Christ's thoughts 
about His death ; even the fringe is part of the 
robe, and if, as the words I have quoted seem 
clearly to indicate, Christ thought of His death 
as in any sense at all a pattern for us, let us 
not miss this, the first and simplest lesson of 
the Cross. 

There are few more impressive scenes in the 



Concerning His own Death 5 7 

history of the Christian pulpit than that in 
which Robertson of Brighton, preaching the 
Assize Sermon at Lewes, turned as he closed 
to the judges, and counsel, and jury, and bade 
them remember, by " the trial hour of Christ," 
by " the Cross of the Son of God," the sacred 
claims of truth : " The first lesson of the Christian 
life is this. Be true ; and the second this, Be 
true ; and the third this, Be true." 

II 

But though this be our starting - point, it 
is no more than a starting-point. If Jesus 
was only a brave man, paying with His life 
the penalty of His bravery in the streets 
of Jerusalem, it is wasting words to call Him 
"the Saviour of the world." If His death 
were only a martyrdom, then, though we may 
honour Him as we honour Socrates, and many 
another name in the long roll of " the noble 
army of martyrs," yet He can no more be 
our Redeemer than can any one of them. But 
it was not so that Christ thought of His death. 
The martyr dies because he must ; Christ died 
because He would. The strong hands of 
violent men snatch away the martyr's life 
from him ; but no man had power to take 
away Christ's life from Him : " I lay it down 
of Myself," He said. The Son of Man gave 
His life. He was not dragged as an unwilling 



58 The Teaching of Jesus 

i^ictim to the sacrifice and bound upon the 
altar. He was both Priest and Victim ; as the 
apostle puts it, " He gave Himself up." True, 
the element of necessity was there — "the Son 
of Man must be lifted up " ; but it was the 
" must " of His own love, not of another's 
constraint. Not Roman nails or Roman thongs 
held Him to the Cross, but His own loving 
will. It is important to emphasize this fact 
of the voluntariness of our Lord's death, because 
at once it sets the Cross in a clearer light. It 
changes martyrdom into sacrifice ; and Christ's 
death, instead of being merely a fate which He 
suffered, becomes now, as Principal Fairbairn 
says, a work which He achieved — the work 
which He came into the world to do : " The 
Son of Man came ... to give His life." ^ 

III 

Again, Christ taught us that His death was 
the crozvning revelation of the love of God for 
man. And it is well to remind ourselves of our 
need of such a revelation. We speak sometimes 
as though the love of God was a self-evident truth 
altogether independent of the facts of New Testa- 
ment history. " God is love " — of course, we say; 
this at least we are sure of, whatever becomes of 
the history. But this jaunty assurance will not 
bear looking into. The truth is that, apart from 

^ The Philosophy of the Christian Religion^ p. 408. 



Concerning His own Death 59 

Christ, we have no certainty of the love of God. 
A man may cry aloud in our ears, " God is love, 
God is love " ; but if he have no more to say than 
that, the most emphatic reiteration will avail us 
nothing. But if he can say, " God is love, and 
He so loved the world that He gave His only 
begotten Son " ; if, that is to say, he can point us 
to the Divine love made manifest in life, then he 
is proclaiming a gospel indeed. But let us not 
deceive ourselves and imagine that we can have 
Christ's gospel apart from Christ. 

Now, according to the teaching of the Gospels, 
all Christ's life — all He was and said and did — is 
a revelation of the love of God. But the crown 
of the revelation was given in His death. It is 
the Cross which was, in a special and peculiar 
sense, as Christ Himself declared,^ the glory both 
of the Father and the Son. And the apostles, 
with a unanimity which can only be explained as 
the result of His own teaching, always associate 
God's love with Christ's death in a way in which 
they never associate God's love with Christ's life. 
" God," says St. Paul, " commendeth His own love 
toward us, in that . . . Christ died for us." 

Christ's death, then, we say, establishes the love 
of God. But how does this come to pass ? How 
does the death of one prove the love of another ? 
If — to use a very simple illustration — I am in 
danger of drowning, and another man, at the cost 
of his own life, saves mine, his act undoubtedly 

^ John xii. 27, 28; xiii. 31 ; xvii. i. 



6o The Teaching of Jesus 

proves his own love ; but how does it prove any- 
thing concerning God's love ? If the apostle had 
said, " Christ commendeth His own love towards 
us, in that He died for us," we could have under- 
stood him ; but how, I ask again, does Christ's 
death prove God's love ? The question is answer- 
able, as indeed the whole of the New Testament 
is intelligible, only on the assumption of the 
Trinitarian doctrine of Christ. If Christ were 
indeed the Son of God, standing to God in such 
a relation that what He did was likewise the 
doing of God the Father, we can understand the 
apostle's meaning. On any other hypothesis his 
language is a riddle of which the key has been 
lost. A further question still remains to be 
answered. I said just now that if St. Paul had 
written, ^^ Christ commendeth His own love towards 
us, in that He died for us," we could have under- 
stood Him. But here, also, something is implicit 
which requires to be made explicit. How does 
Christ in His death prove His love for us? Ob- 
viously, only in one way : by bearing responsibilities 
which must otherwise have fallen upon us. There 
must be, as Dr. Denney rightly argues, some rational 
relation between our necessities and what Christ 
has done before we can speak of His act as a 
proof of His love. If, to borrow the same writer's 
illustration, a man lose his own life in saving me 
from drowning, this is love to the uttermost ; but 
if, when I was in no peril, he had thrown himself 
into the water and got drowned " to prove his love 



Concerning His own Death 61 

for me," the deed and its explanation would be 
alike unintelligible. We must take care when we 
speak of the death of Christ that we do not make 
it equally meaningless. How Christ Himself 
thought of it as related to the necessities of sinful 
men, the next and last division of this chapter 
will, I hope, make plain. 

IV 

" The Son of Man came to give His life a 
ransom for many; " " This is My blood of the covenant 
which is shed for many unto remission of sins." 
These are the two great texts which reveal to us 
the mind of Christ concerning the significance of 
His death. There has been much discussion of 
their meaning into which it is impossible here to 
enter. But whatever questions modern scholar- 
ship may raise, there can be little doubt as to the 
sense in which Christ's words were understood by 
the first disciples. " His own self," said Peter, 
" bare our sins in His body upon the tree." 
" Herein is love," said John, " not that we loved 
God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to 
be the propitiation for our sins." He " loved me," 
said Paul, " and gave Himself for me." It is 
open, doubtless, to question the legitimacy of these 
apostolic deductions, and to fall back upon 
Matthew Arnold's Aberglaube ; but who, it has 
been well said, " are most likely to have correctly 
apprehended the significance which Jesus attached 



62 The Teaching of Jesus 

to His death, men like John and Peter and Paul, 
or an equal number of scholars in our time, how- 
ever discerning and candid, who undertake tc 
reconstruct the thoughts of Jesus, and to dis- 
entangle them from the supposed subjective 
reflections of His disciples ? Where is the sub- 
jectivity likely to be the greatest — in the interpre- 
tations of the eye and ear witness, or in the 
reconstructions of the moderns ? " ^ 

Christ gave His life " a ransom for many." 
The truth cannot be put too simply : " God for- 
gives our sins because Christ died for them ; " 
" in that death of Christ our condemnation came 
upon Him, that for us there might be condemna- 
tion no more ; " " the forfeiting of His free life 
has freed our forfeited lives." ^ 

" Bearing shame and scoffing rude, 
In my place condemned He stood ; 
Sealed my pardon with His blood ; 

Alleluia ! what a Saviour ! ^ 

If this is true, the New Testament has a 
meaning, and, what is more, we sinful men have 
a gospel. If it is not true, it is difficult to 
know why the New Testament was written, and 
still more difflcult to know what we must do to 
be saved. It does not help to point us to the 
parable of the Prodigal Son, and tell us that 
there is a story of salvation without an atonement. 

^ G. B. Stevens, Theology of the New Testament, p. 133. 
2 I quote once more from Dr. Denney. 



Concerning His own Death 63 

The whole gospel cannot be put into a parable, 
not even into such a parable as this. Besides, 
if the argument proves anything, it proves too 
much. The parable is not only a story of 
salvation without an atonement, it is a story of 
salvation without Christ ; and if no more is 
needed than what is given here, Christ Himself 
is no part of His own gospel, forgiveness can be 
had with no reference to Him. But it is not so 
the redeemed have learned Christ ; it is not thus 
they have received forgiveness. They know that 
it is " in Him " they have their redemption, 
through His blood ; and apart from Him there is 
no salvation and no gospel. 

It is time to bring our reasonings to an end. 
We are under the shadow of the Cross ; let us 
worship and adore. When Christ died on the 
tree nineteen hundred years ago, there were some 
that mocked, and some that watched and yet saw 
nothing — nothing but a miserable criminal's 
miserable end ; a few there were that wept, and 
one there was who cried, with lips already white 
with death, "Jesus, remember me when Thou 
comest in Thy kingdom." And still does that 
Cross divide men. Where is our place, and with 
whom are we? Not, I think, with them that 
mock ; for these to-day are a broken and dis- 
credited few. We choose rather the centurion's 
cry, " Certainly this was a righteous man." But 
is this all we have to say? He who gave His 
life-blood for us, shall He have no more than 



64 The Teaching of Jesus 

this — the little penny-pieces of our respect ? If 
we owe Him aught we owe Him all ; and if we 
give Him aught let us give Him all — not our 
thanks but our souls. " He loved me^ and gave Him- 
self up for me'' — there is the secret of the Cross 
which no man knows save he who cannot speak 
of it without the personal pronouns. Until then 
we are but as blind watchers that look and see not. 
" Jesus, remember me " — this is the word that 
becomes us best. Let us cry unto Him now, and 
He who heard the robber's prayer on the Cross 
will hear and save us. 



:ONCERNING THE HOLY SPIRIT 



6s 



** Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, 

And lighten with celestial fire ; 

Thou the Anointing Spirit art, 

"Who dost Thy sevenfold gifts impart. 

Thy blessed unction from above 

Is comfort, life, and fire of love : 

Enable with perpetual light 

The dulness of our blinded sight ; 

Anoint and cheer our soiled face 

With the abundance of Thy grace ; 

Keep far our foes ; give peace at home ; 

"Where Thou art guide no ill can come ; 

Teach us to know the Father, Son, 
- And Thee of Both, to be but One : 

That, through the ages all along, 

This, this may be our endless song, 
' Praise to Thy eternal merit, 
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ! ' '* 
Amen ! 

Bishop John Cosin. 



66 



V 
CONCERNING THE HOLY SPIRIT 

" / will pray the Father, and He shall give you another 
Comforter, that He may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of 
truth.''' — ^JOHN xiv. 1 6. 

" It is expedient for you that I go away : for if I go not away, 
the Comforter will not cotne unto you ; hut if I go, I will send Him 
unto you" — John xvi. 7. 

IT was the night in which He was betrayed. 
Jesus and His disciples were spending their 
last hours together before His death. For Him 
the morrow could bring with it no surprise. He 
knew that His hour was come — the hour to 
which all other hours of His past had pointed ; 
and He was ready. Before He left that Upper 
Room, He lifted up His eyes to heaven and said, 
" Father, the hour is come ; glorify Thy Son." 
But to the disciples that night was a night of 
darkness, and terror, and confusion. They re- 
membered how He had told them He must 
die ; they knew the bloodhounds in Jerusalem 
were on His track ; they could see the shadow's 
black edge creeping nearer and nearer ; and yet 
they could do nothing; they could not even 

67 



68 The Teaching oj Jesus 

persuade Him that anything needed to be done. 
Nay, it almost seemed as if He were taking part 
with His enemies against them. " It is expedient 
for you," He said, " that I go away " — veiling in 
His pity the horror of His going. "Expedient'" 
for them ? How could He speak like that ? 
Was He not everything to them ? If He went 
away, what was to befall them ? They would be 
as sheep in the midst of wolves, as orphans in an 
unkindly world. Is it any wonder that sorrow 
filled their hearts ? 

And not only to these His first disciples, but 
to many of His- followers in later days, this word 
of Jesus has proved a hard saying. If only, we 
think. He were with us as He was with Peter and 
James and John ; if only we could hear Him 
teach in our streets, or in our church, as once 
He taught in the streets of Jerusalem and the 
synagogue at Nazareth ; if only He could enter 
our homes, as once He entered the home at 
Bethany, how easy it would be to believe ! But, 
now He is no longer here, the air is filled with 
doubting voices, and faith is very hard. 

So sometimes we speak. But, have we 
noticed, this is never the language of the New 
Testament. To begin with, it is not the language 
of Christ There is an unmistakable emphasis in 
His words : " Because I have spoken these things 
unto you, sorrow hath filled your heart. Never- 
theless, I tell you the truth : it is expedient for 
you that I go away." When Paul was a prisoner 



Concerning the Holy Spirit 69 

in Rome, he wrote to the Philippians, saying, 
" I am in a strait betwixt the two, having the 
desire to depart and be with Christ ; for it is very 
far better ; yet to abide in the flesh is more 
needful for your sake." That is how a good 
man, in the prospect of death, naturally feels 
towards those who are in any way dependent on 
him. But Christ's language is the very opposite 
of this ; He says, not that it is needful to abide, 
but that it is expedient to depart. And in every 
reference to Christ by the apostles after His 
Ascension, the same note is struck. It is hardly 
too much to say, as one writer does, " that no 
apostle, no New Testament writer, ever re- 
membered Christ." ^ They thought of Him as 
belonging, not to the past, but to the present ; 
He was the object, not of memory, but of faith. 
Never do they wish Him back in their midst ; 
never do they mourn for Him as for a friend 
whom they have lost. On the contrary, they felt 
that Christ was with them now in a sense in 
which He had never been. There is no hint that 
any even of the Twelve would have gone back 
to the old days had it been possible. They had 
lost, but they had also gained, and their gain was 
greater than their loss. " Even though we have 
known Christ after the flesh," they also would 
have said, " yet now we know Him so no more." 
Read over again St. Luke's account of our Lord's 
Ascension : " He led them out until they were 
^ J. Denney, Studies in Theology y p. 154, 



70 The Teaching of Jesus 

over against Bethany ; and He lifted up His 
hands and blessed them. And it came to pass, 
while He blessed them, He parted from them, 
and was carried up into heaven. And they 
worshipped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with 
great joy ; and were continually in the temple, 
blessing God." Christ had gone from them a 
second time, no more to return as before He had 
returned from the tomb ; yet now it is not despair 
but joy which fills their hearts : " They returned 
to Jerusalem with great joy." When in the Upper 
Room, Christ had said, " It is expedient for you 
that I go away," sorrow had filled their hearts ; 
but, now that He is gone, their sorrow is turned 
into joy. How shall we explain this strange 
reversal ? 



It is to be explained in part, of course, by 
the Resurrection of Christ from the dead, but 
mainly — and this is the fact with which just now 
we are concerned — by the gift of the Holy Spirit 
whom Christ had promised to His disciples to 
abide with them for ever. But now, what do we 
mean when we speak of the gift of the Holy 
Spirit? What is the Holy Spirit, and what is it 
that He does for us ? Many of us, I think, must 
have felt how extremely unreal, and therefore 
unsatisfying, the discussions of this great subject 
often are. The doctrine somehow fails to find 
a place among the proved realities of our Christian 



Concerning the Holy Spirit 7 1 

experience. It remains, so to speak, outside of 
us, a foreign substance which life has not assimi- 
lated. And hence it has come to pass that there 
is no small danger to-day lest New Testament 
phrases about being filled with the Spirit, baptized 
with the Spirit, and so forth, become the mere 
jargon of a school which wholly fails to interpret 
the mind of Christ. Doubtless there are faults 
on both sides, the faults of neglect and the faults 
of false emphasis, and for both the true remedy 
is a more careful study of the teaching of Jesus. 

What, then, is the Holy Spirit, and what is it 
He does for us ? "I will pray the Father," 
Christ said, " and He shall give you another 
Comforter," or " another Paraclete." The word 
translated " Comforter," which occurs so often in 
this discourse of our Lord, is found nowhere else 
in the New Testament except in the First Epistle 
of St. John, where it is rendered "Advocate"; 
" If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the 
Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous." And this, 
without doubt, is a more faithful rendering of the 
word which Christ used than the more familiar 
" Comforter." An advocate is one who is called 
to our side to be our friend and helper, more 
especially to plead our cause in a court of justice ; 
and this also is the meaning of the word " Para- 
clete." Perhaps,, however, the word " Comforter " 
may be retained without loss, if only we remember 
to give it its full and original meaning. To 
" comfort " is not primarily and originally to 



72 The Teaching of Jesus 

console, but to strengthen, to fortMy ; and the 
"Comforter" whom Christ promised to His 
disciples was not only one who should soothe 
them in their sorrows, but should stand by them in 
all their conflicts, their unfailing friend and helper. 

Further, Christ said God " shall give you 
another Comforter." That is to say, Christ Him- 
self was a Comforter, and all that He had been 
to His disciples the Holy Spirit should be also. 
And, if we examine the three chapters of this 
Gospel which contain this great discourse of our 
Lord, we shall find this idea taken up, and re- 
peated, and developed in passage after passage. 
The Holy Spirit was to come in Christ's name, 
'as Christ's representative and interpreter. " He 
shall not speak from Himself," Christ said ; " He 
shall bear witness of Me. He shall glorify Me ; 
for He shall take of Mine, and shall declare it 
unto you." In the presence of the Spirit Christ 
Himself would be present : " I will not leave you 
desolate," He said ; " I come unto you ; " " I will 
see you again, and your heart shall rejoice." And, 
for the sake of such a presence, a presence which 
was to be not for a little while but for ever, 
it was best for His friends that He should leave 
them.^ 

It is in these words, I believe, that we have 

the key to the New Testament doctrine of the 

Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the Spirit of Christ ; 

He is sent by Christ ; He comes to continue 

1 See W. N. Clarke's Outlines of Christian Theology p. 373. 



Concerning the Holy Spirit 73 

the work of Christ. He is, as one writer has it, 
Christ's alter ego, or, as it was said long ago, 
Christ's "■ Vicar," or substitute, on the earth.^ 
When, therefore, we speak of the presence of the 
Spirit, what we mean, or what we ought to mean, 
is the spiritual presence of Christ. In the Holy 
Spirit Christ Himself is present, wherever, as He 
said, two or three are gathered together in His 
name. In the Holy Spirit, given to be with us 
for ever. He makes good to His disciples the 
great word of His promise, " Lo, I am with you 
alway, even unto the end of the world." This 
is the fact continually to be kept in mind — the 
Spirit is the Spirit of Christ ; for, if this be 
forgotten, then, as all experience shows, either 
the doctrine is wholly ignored, or it is made the 
subject of that vague, unreal way of speaking, 
which, alas ! is so often the bane of spiritual 
truth. 

At the same time, what has been said must 
not be interpreted so as to suggest that the Holy 
Spirit is merely an impersonal influence. On 
the contrary, the words of our Lord quoted above 
distinctly imply what we call " personality," and 
a personality separate from His own. If all that 
Jesus really meant to . teach was that He would 

1 *' It is the Holy Spirit who supplies the bodily presence of 
Christ, and by Him doth He accomplish all His promises to the 
Church. Hence, some of the ancients call Him ' Vicarium Christi,' 
' The Vicar of Christ,' or Him who represents His person and 
dischargeth His promised work : Operant navat Christo vicariam.^'' 
— Owen, Works, vol. iii. p. 193. 



74 The Teaching of Jesus 

manifest His own invisible presence to His dis- 
ciples by spiritual influences, we can only con- 
clude that His words have been tampered with ; 
as they stand, it is impossible that this should 
exhaust their meaning. To teach, to bear wit- 
ness, to guide, to bring to remembrance, to 
declare the things that are to come, — these are 
the acts, not of a Power, but of a Person ; and 
all these things, Christ said, the Holy Spirit should 
do. Indeed, it is not easy to see how language 
could have been framed to set forth the idea of 
a Divine Person, separate alike from the Father 
and the Son, more explicitly than we find it in 
these chapters.^ 

II 

We turn now to the second part of our 
question : What is it that the Holy Spirit does 
for us ? Christ's teaching on the work of the 
Spirit may be gathered up under two heads: (i) 
His work in the Church ; (2) His work in the world. 

(i) When we speak of the Spirit's work in 
the Church, it must be understood that the refer- 
ence is to no particular ecclesiastical organization, 
but to the people of Christ generally, " the men 
and women in whom the spiritual work of Christ 
is going forward." And among these the Holy 
Spirit works in two ways. 

1 "Our sources with the utmost possible uniformity refer to the 
Spirit in terms implying personality." — Stevens, Theology of the 
New Testament {y^. 215), where the whole question is discussed with 
great fulness and fairness. 



Concerning the Holy Spirit 75 

{a) He is the Spirit of truth, the Divine Re- 
membrancer : " He shall guide you into all the 
truth ;" " He shall take of Mine, and shall declare 
it unto you ; " " He shall teach you all things, and 
bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you." 
It is not, it will be observed, all truth, but all the 
truth of Christ, with which the Spirit deals — the 
truth concerning Him, and the truth which He 
taught. Nor is it a new revelation which the 
Spirit gives, but rather a more perfect under- 
standing of that which has been already given in 
Christ. Here, then, is the test by which to try 
all that claims the authority of spiritual truth. 
Does it " glorify " Christ } Does it lead us into 
a fuller knowledge of Him " in whom are all the 
treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden " ? 
"Whosoever goeth onward," says St. John, in a 
remarkable passage, for which English readers are 
indebted to the Revised Version, " and abideth 
not in the teaching of Christ, hath not God." In 
other words, no true progress is possible except 
as we abide in Christ. If He be ignored and left 
behind, though we still keep the name and boast 
ourselves " progressives," we have lost the reality. 
On the other hand, every new discovery, every 
movement in the life of men, every intellectual 
and spiritual awakening which serves to make 
manifest the glory of Christ as Creator, or Re- 
vealer, or Redeemer, is a fresh fulfilment of His 
promise concerning the guiding Spirit of truth. 
Perhaps our best commentary is the history of the 



76 The Teaching of Jesus 

Church. In the New Testament itself we have 
the first-fruits of the Spirit's work. There we 
may see, in Gospels and Epistles, how the Spirit 
took of the things of Christ and showed them 
unto His disciples. And all through the varied 
history of the Church's long past, that same 
Divine Remembrancer has been at work, calling 
us through the lips of an Augustine, a Luther, or 
a Wesley, into the fulness of the inheritance of 
truth which is ours in Christ Jesus. 

{U) The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of power. 
" Behold," said the ascending Christ, " I send 
forth the promise of My Father upon you ; but 
tarry ye in the city until ye be clothed with 
power from on high." And, again, " Ye shall 
receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon 
you." Of Jesus Himself it was said by one of 
His disciples " that God anointed Him with the 
Holy Ghost and with power " ; and of His dis- 
ciples Jesus said : " He that believeth on Me, the 
works that I do shall He do also ; and greater 
works than these shall he do ; because I go unto 
the Father." Here, again, our best commentary 
is the history of the Church, and especially the 
first chapter of that history as it is written in the 
Acts of the Apostles. This was the promise, 
" Ye shall receive power," and this, in brief, the 
story of its fulfilment, " With great power gave 
the apostles their witness of the resurrection of 
the Lord Jesus." Let any one read the early 
chapters of St. Luke's narrative ; let him mark 



Concerning the Holy Spirit 7 7 

the utter disparity between the " acts " and the 
" apostles " — between the things done and the 
men by whom they were done — and then let 
him ask if there is any explanation which does 
really bridge the gulf short of this, that behind 
Peter and John and the rest there stood Another, 
speaking through their lips, working through 
their hands, Himself the real Doer in all those 
wondrous " acts " ? When D. L. Moody was 
holding in Birmingham one of those remarkable 
series of meetings which so deeply stirred our 
country in the early 'seventies. Dr. Dale, who 
followed the work with the keenest sympathy, 
and yet not without a feeling akin to stupefac- 
tion at the amazing results which it produced, 
once told Moody that the work was most plainly 
of God, for he could see no real relation between 
him and what he had done. Is not this disparity 
the very sign-manual of the Holy Spirit's pre- 
sence ? " Why," asked Peter, when the multitude 
were filled with wonder and amazement at the 
healing of the lame man, " Why fasten ye your eyes 
on us as though by our own power or godliness 
we had made him to walk ? " Work that is really 
of God can never be accounted for in that fashion. 
There is always a something in the effects which 
cannot be traced back to a human cause. Let 
" our own power and godliness " be what they 
may — and they can never be too great — they are 
all vain and helpless apart from the power of 
God. " I planted, Apollos watered ; God gave 



yS The Teaching of Jesus 

the increase." Wherefore let the Church trust 
neither in him that planteth nor in him that 
watereth, but in God who giveth the increase. 

(2) We come now to the Holy Spirit's work 
in the world. And, just as in speaking of the 
" Church " it was not any visible organization 
which we had in mind, so now by the " world " is 
not meant merely the persons who are outside all 
such organizations. There is, as we are often re- 
minded nowadays, a Church outside the Churches ; 
and, on the other hand, not a little of what Christ 
meant by the " world " is often to be found inside 
what we mean by the " Church." The " world," 
then, is simply the mass of men, wherever they 
are to be found, who are living apart from God. 
Now, of this world Christ said it " cannot re- 
ceive " the Spirit of truth ; " it beholdeth Him 
not, neither knoweth Him." If, therefore, there 
is a ministry of the Spirit in the world, it must 
be wholly different in kind from that spoken of 
above. And this is what we learn from Christ's 
teaching : " He, when He is come, will convict 
the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, 
and of judgment." There is a ring of judicial 
sternness in the words ; they call up to our minds 
the solemnities of a court of justice — the indict- 
ment, the conviction, the condemnation. And 
yet one can well believe that there were hours in 
the after life of the apostles when, of all the 
comforting, reassuring words which Christ had 
spoken to them in that Upper Room, there were 



Concerning the Holy Spirit 79 

none more helpful than these. For they knew 
now that, when they stood up to bear their wit- 
ness before a hostile world, they had a fellow- 
witness in men's hearts. They could go nowhere 
— in Jerusalem, Judaea, Samaria, or the uttermost 
parts of the earth — where the gracious ministries 
of the Spirit had not preceded them. He, the 
Paraclete, was not only with them, their " strong- 
siding Champion," He was in the world also, in 
the hearts even of them who set themselves most 
stoutly against the Lord and against His Anointed, 
subduing their rebelliousness and reconciling them 
to God. We who teach and preach to-day, do 
we think of these things as we ought ? Does 
not our message sometimes win a response which 
is at once a surprise and a rebuke to us? We 
knew that the seed which we cast into the ground 
was the word of God ; but the soil seemed so 
poor and thin we scarce had looked for any 
harvest ; yet the seed sprang up and grew, we 
knew not how. We had forgotten that over all 
that wide field which is the world the Divine 
Husbandman is ever at work, at work while men 
sleep, breaking up the fallow ground, and making 
ready the soil for the seed. We need to learn to 
count more on God, to grasp more fully the 
glorious breadth of promise which He has given 
us in His Spirit, to remember that, not only in the 
Church, but in the world — which is His world — that 
Spirit is always present to testify of God, to convict 
men of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment 



8o * The Teaching of Jesus 

And yet, while we encourage ourselves with 
thoughts like these, we dare not forget that men 
may resist, they may grieve, they may quench the 
Holy Spirit. He is grieved whensoever He is 
resisted ; He may be resisted until He is quenched. 
It was Christ Himself who spoke of a sin against 
the Holy Spirit which " hath never forgiveness." 
Is there any more painful, perplexing, and yet 
more certain fact in life than this, that man can 
resist God } Is there any that has bound up with 
it more terrible and inevitable issues ? " Ye stiff- 
necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears," cried 
the martyr Stephen to his judges, " ye do always 
resist the Holy Ghost : as your fathers did, so do 
ye." And the end for their fathers and for them 
we know. Wherefore the Holy Spirit saith : " To- 
day, if ye shall hear His voice, harden not your 
hearts." 



CONCERNING 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD 



8i 



" The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but 
righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost." — St. Paul. 



83 



VI 

CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

** Thy kingdom come. Thy will be doiie, as in heaven^ so on 
earth.'''' — Matt. vi. lo. 

I 

ONE of the most obvious features of the teach- 
ing of Jesus is the prominence which it gives 
to what is called " the kingdom of heaven," or, " the 
kingdom of God." And this prominence becomes 
the more striking when we turn from the Gospels 
to the Epistles where the phrase is only rarely to 
be found. With Jesus the kingdom was a kind 
of watchword which was continually on His lips. 
Thus, e.g.^ St. Mark begins his account of the 
preaching of Jesus in these words : " After that 
John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee, 
preaching the Gospel of God and saying. The time 
is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand : 
repent ye, and believe in the Gospel." In like 
manner, St. Matthew tells us that " Jesus went 
about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, 
and preaching the gospel of the kingdom." 
Parable after parable opens with the formula 

83 



84 The Teaching of Jt 



estts 



" The kingdom of heaven is like unto ," or, 

" So is the kingdom of God as if ," or, " How 

shall we liken the kingdom of God ? " When 
Christ sent forth the Twelve, this was His com- 
mand, " Go . . . and as ye go, preach, saying. 
The kingdom of heaven is at hand." Again, when 
He sent forth the Seventy, He said, " Into what- 
soever city ye enter . . . say unto them. The 
kingdom of God is come nigh unto you." And 
in the great Forty Days, before He was received 
up, it was still of " the things concerning the 
kingdom of God " that He spake unto His dis- 
ciples. Every time a little child is baptized we 
call to mind His words, " For of such is the king- 
dom of God." Every time we repeat the prayer 
He taught His disciples to pray we say, " Thy 
kingdom come." In all, it is said, there are no 
less than one hundred and twelve references to 
the kingdom to be found in the Gospels. 

When, however, we turn to the Epistles what 
do we find ? In the whole of St. Paul's Epistles 
the kingdom is not named as often as in the 
briefest of the four Gospels. It is mentioned only 
once by St. Peter, once by St. James, once by the 
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and not at 
all in the three Epistles of St. John. Not only 
so, but at least until quite recent times, the Church 
of Christ has in the main followed the lead of the 
apostles, and has said but little of the kingdom of 
God. How is this to be explained ? Does it 
mean that the whole Church of Christ, including 



Concerning the Kingdom of God 85 

the Church of the apostles, has failed to under- 
stand the mind of the Master, and has let slip 
an essential element of His teaching ? So some 
recent writers do not hesitate to declare. Burke 
once said that he did not know how to draw up 
an indictment against a whole people ; but these, 
apparently, have no difficulty in drawing up an 
indictment against the whole Church. " With all 
respect to the great Apostle," writes one of them, 
" one may be allowed to express his regret that 
St. Paul has not said less about the Church and 
more about the Kingdom."-^ To which I hope 
one may be forgiven if he is tempted to retort 
that the great apostle probably knew what he was 
about as well as his modern critic can teir him. 
We shall do well to pause, and pause again, before 
we accept any interpretation of the facts of the 
New Testament which implies that we to-day have 
a better understanding of the mind of Christ than 
the apostles had. For my own part, whenever I 
come across any writer who tries to correct Paul 
by Jesus, I find it safest to assume that he has 
mis -read Paul, or Jesus, or both. Moreover, 
though we need make no claim of infallibility for 
the Church, yet, if we believe in a Holy Spirit 

^ John Watson, The Mind of the Master, p. 321. May we 
remind Dr. Watson of what he has himself written on the first 
page of his Doctrines of Grace : "It was tlie mission of St. Paul to 
declare the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to the 
nations, and none of his successors in this high office has spoken 
with such persuasive power. Anj/ one differs from St. Paul at his 
intellectual pertly and every one may imitate him with spiritual 
profit." 



86 The Teaching of Jesus 

given to guide the disciples of Christ into all the 
truth of Christ, we shall find it difficult to believe 
at the same time that the whole Church has from 
the beginning missed the right way, and in a 
matter so important as this, failed to apprehend 
the thought of Christ. 

We are not, however, shut up to any such 
unworthy conclusions. There is another and 
sufficient explanation of the facts to which refer- 
ence has been made. It was natural that Jesus, 
speaking in the first instance to Jews, should move 
as far as possible within the circle of ideas with 
which they were already familiar. Now, no phrase 
had a more thoroughly familiar sound to Jewish 
ears than this of the kingdom of God. It needed, 
of course, to be purified and enlarged before it 
could be made the vehicle of the loftier ideas of 
Jesus. Still, the idea was there, " a point of 
attachment," as one writer says, in the minds of 
his hearers to which Jesus could fasten what He 
wished to say. But after our Lord's Resurrection 
and Ascension, and especially after the fall of 
Jerusalem, the whole condition of things was 
changed. A phrase which in the synagogues of 
the Jews proved helpful and illumining, might 
easily become, among the populations of Asia 
Minor, of Greece, and of Italy, to whom the 
gospel was now preached, useless, and even mis- 
leading. Is it any wonder, therefore, if the first 
Christian missionaries quietly dropped the old 
phrase and found others to take its place? Men 



Concerning the Kingdom of God Z"] 

who knew themselves guided by the Spirit of Jesus 
would not feel compelled to quote the words of 
Jesus, if, under altered circumstances, other words 
more fittingly expressed His thoughts.^ 



II 

What did Jesus mean when He spoke of the 
kingdom of God ? The idea as set forth in the 
Gospels is so complex, the phrase is used to 
cover so many and different conceptions, that it is 
practically impossible to frame a definition within 
which all the sayings of Jesus concerning the 
kingdom can be included. The nearest approach 
to a definition which it is necessary to attempt is 
suggested by the two petitions in the Lord's 
Prayer which are quoted above. The second 
petition explains the first : the kingdom comes in 
proportion as men do on earth the will of God. 
For our present purpose, therefore, we may think 
of the kingdom as a spiritual commonwealth 
embracing all who do God's will. To much that 
Christ taught concerning the kingdom — its Head, 
its numbers, its growth and development — it is 
impossible, in one brief discourse, even to refer. 
Here again, it must suffice to single out one or 
two points for special emphasis. 

^ See, in confirmation of the argument of this paragraph, Orr's 
Christian View of God and the World, p. 401 ff., and Art. "The 
Kingdom of God," in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible; Denney's 
Stttdies in Theology^ Lect. VIII. 



S8 The Teaching of Jesus 

(i) In the doctrine of the kingdom of God, we 
have set before us the social aspect of Christ's 
teaching ; it reminds us of what we owe, not only 
to Him who is its King, but to those who are our 
fellow-subjects. Of particular duties it is impossible 
to speak, though these, as we know, fill a large 
place in the teaching of Jesus. But let us at least 
bring home to ourselves the thought of obligation, 
obligation involved in and springing out of our 
common relationship as members of the kingdom 
of God. The obligation is writ large on every 
page of the New Testament — in the Gospels, in 
the doctrine of the kingdom ; in the Epistles, in 
the corresponding doctrine of the Church. It can 
hardly be said too often, that, according to the 
New Testament ideal, there are no unattached 
Christians. The apostles never conceive of religion 
as merely a private matter between the soul and 
God. All true religion, as John Wesley used to 
say, is not solitary but social. Its starting-point 
is the individual, but its goal is a kingdom. Christ 
came to save men and women in order that 
through them He might build up a redeemed 
society in which the will of God should be done. 
We do, indeed, often hear of Christians whose 
religion begins and ends with getting their own 
souls saved. This simply means that so far as it is 
true they are not yet Christian. To think only of 
oneself is to deny one of the first principles of the 
kingdom. Wesley taught the early Methodists to 
sing — 



Concerning the Kingdom of God 89 

"A charge to keep I have. 
A God to glorify ; 
A never-dying soul to save, 
And fit it for the sky ; " 

and some of his followers, both early and later, 
seem to have thought that this was the whole of 
the hymn ; but the verse goes on without a full 

stop — 

"To serve the present age, 
My calling to fulfil ; 
O may it all my powers engage 
To do my Master's will ! " 

And until we who profess and call ourselves 
Christians have learned this lesson of service, and 
have entered into Christ's thought of the kingdom, 
with its interlacing network of obligations, we have 
still need that some one teach us again the rudi- 
ments of the first principles of the oracles of God. 
(2) Again, the kingdom of God, Christ taught, 
is present ; it is not of, but it is in, this world, set 
up in the midst of the existing order of things. 
There are, it is true, passages in which Christ 
speaks of the kingdom as in the future, and to 
come. Thus, e.g.^ He speaks of a time when men 
" shall come from the east and west, and from the 
north and south, and shall sit down in the kingdom 
of God " ; when " the righteous shall shine forth 
as the sun in the kingdom of their Father "; when 
they shall " inherit the kingdom prepared for " them 
" from the foundation of the world " ; and so forth. 
But there is no real contradiction between this and 



90 The Teaching of Jt 



estis 



what has been already said. The kingdom is a 
growth, a movement working itself out in history, 
and therefore it may be said to be past, present, or 
future, according to our point of view. In the 
sense that it has not yet fully come, that its final 
consummation is still waited for, it is future ; and 
so sometimes Christ speaks of it. But it is simply 
impossible to do justice to all His sayings and 
deny that in His thought the kingdom is also 
present. Its consummation may belong to the 
future, its beginnings are here already. When 
Christ calls it the kingdom of heaven, it is rather 
its origin and character that are suggested than 
the sphere of its realization. In parable after 
parable He speaks of it as a secret, silent energy 
already at work in the world. He called on men 
here and now to seek it, and to enter it. So 
eagerly were the lost and the perishing pressing 
into it that once He declared that from the days 
of John the Baptist the kingdom of heaven suffered 
violence. Not in some future heaven but here 
" on earth " He bade His disciples pray that 
God's will might be done. " When Jesus said 
the kingdom of heaven, be sure He did not mean 
an unseen refuge, whither a handful might one day 
escape, like persecuted and disheartened Puritans 
fleeing from a hopeless England, but He intended 
what might be and then was in Galilee, what should 
be and now is in England." ^ " Thy kingdom 
come " — it is here on earth we must look for the 

1 J. Watson, The Mind of the Master, p. 323. 



Co7icerning the Kingdo^n of God 9 1 

answer to our prayer. And every man who him- 
self does, and in every possible way strives to get 
done, God's will among men, is Christ's co-worker 
and fellow-builder. 

" I will not cease from mental fight, 

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, 
Till we have built Jerusalem 

In England's green and pleasant land." 

That is the spirit of all the true servants of Jesus. 
(3) But the most important fact concerning the 
kingdom in Christ's viev/ of it is that it is spiritual. 
And, because it is spiritual, it failed wholly to 
satisfy the earth-bound ambitions of the Jews. 
For generations they had fed their national pride 
with visions of a world obedient to Israel's sway, 
and when one who claimed to be the Messiah 
nevertheless told them plainly that His kingdom 
was not of this world, they turned from Him as 
from one that mocked. He and they both spoke 
of a kingdom of God, but while they emphasized 
the " kingdom " He emphasized " God." So 
wholly did men fail to enter into His mind that on 
one occasion two of His own disciples came to 
Him asking that they might sit, one on the right 
hand, and one on the left hand in His glory. 
And even when He was just about to leave them, 
and to return to His Father, the old ambitions 
still made themselves heard. " Lord," said they, 
" dost Thou at this time restore again the kingdom 
to Israel ? " But with all such dreams of temporal 



92 The Teaching of Ji 



estts 



sovereignty Christ would have nothing to do ; He 
had put them from Him, definitely and for ever, 
in the Temptation in the wilderness. He com- 
pletely reversed the current notions concerning the 
kingdom. " Being asked by the Pharisees when 
the kingdom of God cometh, He answered them 
and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with 
observation ; neither shall they say, Lo, here ! or, 
There ! for lo, the kingdom of God is within 
you." And when self-complacent religious leaders 
flattered themselves that, of course, the first places 
in the kingdom would be theirs. He sternly warned 
them that they might find themselves altogether 
shut out while the publicans and harlots whom they 
despised were admitted. Through all His teaching 
Christ laid the emphasis on character. Pride, and 
love of power, and sordid ambitions, and all self- 
seeking — for these things, and for them that 
cherished these things, the kingdom had no place. 
" Blessed," Christ said, " are the poor in spirit : 
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." *' Except ye 
turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no 
wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." " Whoso- 
ever would become great among you, shall be your 
minister ; and whosoever would be first among you 
shall be servant of all " — these are they that are 
accounted worthy of the kingdom of God. 

The earliest account of Christ's preaching which 
has already been quoted, gives us the right point 
of view for the interpretation of Christ's idea of 
the kingdom as spiritual : "Jesus came into 



Concerning the Kingdom of God 93 

Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, 
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is 
at hand : Repent ye, and believe in the gospel." 
He had come to establish a kingdom whose 
dominion should be for ever, against which the 
gates of hell should not prevail, and the founda- 
tion of it He laid in the penitent and obedient 
hearts of men. This explains why Christ had so 
little to do with programmes, and so much to do 
with men. If a man's right to the title of reformer 
be judged by the magnitude of the revolution 
which he has effected, it is but bare justice to call 
Him the greatest reformer who ever lived. Yet 
He put out no programme ; He made Himself 
the spokesman of no party, the advocate of no 
social or political reform. To the disappointment 
of His friends, as much as to the confusion of His 
enemies, He absolutely refused to take sides on 
the vexed political questions of the hour. " Unto 
Caesar," He said, " render the things that are 
Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." 
But on individuals He spent Himself to the 
uttermost. "He is not only indifferent to numbers, 
but often seems disinclined to deal with numbers. 
He sends the multitude away ; He goes apart into 
a mountain with His chosen disciples ; He with- 
draws Himself from the throng in Jerusalem to the 
quiet home in Bethany ; He discourses of the 
profoundest purposes of His mission with the 
Twelve in an upper room ; He opens the treasures 
of His wisdom before one Pharisee at night, and 



94 The Teaching of Jesus 

one unresponsive woman by the well." ■^ Always 
His work is done not by "external organization or 
mass-movements or force of numbers," but from 
within : " Repent ye and believe in the gospel." 

Now, this was the ve»:y last kind of message 
that the Pharisees of Christ's day were looking for. 
They wanted the world put right — according to 
their own ideas of right— it is true ; but to be told 
that they must begin with themselves was not at 
all what they wanted. Are not many of us in the 
same case to-day ? We are all eager for reforms, 
at least so long as they are from without. We 
have a touching faith in the power of machinery 
and organization. We are quite sure that if 
Parliament would only pass this, that, and the 
other bit of legislative reform, on which our hearts 
are set, the millennium would be here, if not by 
the morning post, at least by the session's end. 
And there is much, undoubtedly, that Parliament 
can and ought to do for us. Nevertheless, was not 
Christ right ? Instead of the old prayer, " Create 
in me a clean heart, O God ; and renew a right 
spirit within me," some of us, as one writer says, 
would rather pray, " Create a better social order, 

God ; and renew a right relation between 
various classes of men." We are ready to begin 
anywhere rather than with ourselves, at any point 
in the big circumference rather than at the centre. 
" I don't deny, my friends," wrote Charles Kingsley 
to the Chartists, " it is much cheaper and pleasanter 

1 F. G. Peabody, Jesus Christ and the Social Question, pp. 88, 89. 



Concerning the Kingdom of God 95 

to be reformed by the devil than by God ; for 
God will only reform society on the condition of 
our reforming every man his own self, while the 
devil is quite ready to help us to mend the laws 
and the Parliament, earth and heaven, without 
ever starting such an impertinent and ' personal ' 
request as that a man should mend himself." Yet 
without self-reform nothing is possible. " The 
character of the aggregate," says Herbert Spencer, 
" is determined by the characters of the units." 
And he illustrates thus : Suppose a man building 
with good, square, well-burnt bricks ; without the 
use of mortar he may build a wall of a certain 
height and stability. But if his bricks are warped 
and cracked or broken, the wall cannot be of the 
same height and stability. If again, instead of 
bricks he use cannon-balls then he cannot build a 
wall at all ; at most, something in the form of a 
pyramid with a square or rectangular base. And 
if, once more, for cannon-balls we substitute rough, 
unhewn boulders, no definite stable form is possible. 
** The character of the aggregate is determined by 
the characters of the units." Every attempt to 
reconstruct society which leaves out of account 
the character of the men and women who consti- 
tute society is foredoomed to failure. Behind every 
social problem stands the greater problem of the 
individual, the redemption of character. We may 
get, as assuredly we ought to get, better houses 
for the working-classes ; but unless we also get 
better working-classes for the houses, we shall not 



96 The Teaching of Jesus 

have greatly mended matters. And no turn of the 
Parliamentary machine will produce these for us. 
We can pass new laws ; only the grace of God can 
make new men. " For my part," says Kingsley 
once more, speaking through the lips of his tailor- 
poet, " I seem to have learnt that the only thing to 
regenerate the world is not more of any system, 
good or bad ; but simply more of the Spirit oi 
God." " Except a man be born aneWy he cannot see 
the kingdom of God!' 



CONCERNING MAN 



97 H 



** Tho' world on world in myriad myriads roll 
Round us, each with different powers, 
And ofher forms of life than ours, 
What know we greater than the soul?" 

Tennyson. 



98 



VII 

CONCERNING MAN 

" There is joy in the presence oj the angels of God over one 
sinner that repenteth." — Luke xv. io. 

THIS is one of many sayings of our Lord 
which reveal His sense of the infinite 
worth of the human soul, which is the central fact 
in His teaching about man, and the only one 
with which in the present chapter we shall be 
concerned. Other aspects of the truth will come 
into view in the following chapter, when we come 
to consider Christ's teaching about sin. 



"The infinite worth of the human soul" — 
this is a discovery the glory of which, it is no 
exaggeration to say, belongs wholly to Christ. It 
is said that one of the most magnificent diamonds 
in Europe, which to-day blazes in a king's crown, 
once lay for months on a stall in a piazza at 
Rome labelled, " Rock-crystal, price one franc." 
And it was thus that for ages the priceless jewel 
^.0^0. 99 



I oo The Teaching of Jesus 

of the soul lay unheeded and despised of men. 
Before Christ came, men honoured the rich, and 
the great, and the wise, as we honour them now ; 
but man as man was of little or no account. If 
one had, or could get, a pedestal by which to lift 
himself above the common crowd, he might count 
for something ; but if he had nothing save his 
own feet to stand upon, he was a mere nobody, 
for whom nobody cared. We turn to the teaching 
of Jesus, and what a contrast ! " Of how much 
more value," He said, " are ye than the birds ! " 
" How much then is a man " — not a rich man, 
not a wise man, not a Pharisee, but a man — " of 
more value than a sheep ! " " What shall it profit 
a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose 
his own soul? Or what shall a man give in 
exchange for his soul ? " It was by thought- 
provoking questions such as these that Jesus 
revealed His own thoughts concerning man. 
And, of course, when He spoke in this way about 
the soul, when He said that a man might gain 
the whole world, but that if the price he paid for 
it were his soul, he was the loser. He was not 
speaking of the souls of a select few, but of the 
souls of all. Every man, every woman, every little 
child — all were precious in His sight. It is man 
as man, Christ taught, that is of worth to God. 

Consider how much is involved in the bare 
fact that Christ came into the world the son of 
a poor mother, and lived in it a poor man. "A 
man's life," He said, " consisteth not in the 



Concerning Man loi 



abundance of the things which he possesseth." 
And the best commentary on the saying is just 
His own Hfe ; for He had nothing. There is 
something very suggestive in Christ's use of the 
httle possessive pronoun " My." We know how 
we use the word. Listen to the rich man in the 
parable : " My fruits," " my barns," " my corn," 
" my goods." Now Hsten to Christ. He says : 
" My Father," " My Church," " My friends," " My 
disciples " ; but He never says " My house," 
" My lands," " My books." The one perfect life 
this earth has seen was the life of One who 
owned nothing, and left behind Him nothing but 
the clothes He wore. And not only was Christ 
poor Himself, He spent His life among the poor. 
" To believe that a man with £60 a year," Canon 
Liddon once said, " is just as much worthy of 
respect as a man with ^6000, you must be 
seriously a Christian." You must indeed. Yet 
that which is for us so hard never seems to have 
cost Christ a struggle. We cannot so much as 
think of mere money, more or less, counting for 
anything in His sight. The little artificial dis- 
tinctions of society were to Him nothing, and 
less than nothing. He went to be guest with 
a man that was a sinner. A woman that was a 
harlot He suffered to wash His feet with her 
tears, and to wipe them with her hair. " This 
man," said His enemies, with scorn vibrant in 
every word, " receiveth sinners and eateth with 
them." And they were right ; but what they 



I02 The Teaching of Jesus 

counted His deepest shame was in reality His 
chiefest glory. 

Now, what does all this mean but simply this, 
that it was for man as man that Christ cared ? 
Observe the difference in the point at which He 
and we become interested in men. We are 
interested in them, for the most part, when, by 
their work, or their wealth, or their fame, they 
have added something to themselves ; in other 
words, we become interested when they become 
interesting. But that which gave worth to man 
in Christ's eyes lay beneath all these merely 
adventitious circumstances of his life, in his naked 
humanity, in what he was, or might be, in him- 
self This is why to Him all souls were dear. 
We love them that love us, the loving and the 
lovable ; Christ loved the unloving and the un- 
lovable. He was named, and rightly named, 
" Friend of publicans and sinners." Then were 
bad men of worth to Christ ? They were ; for, 
as Tennyson says, " If there be a devil in man, 
there is an angel too." Christ saw the possible 
angel in the actual devil. He knew that the lost 
might be found, and the bad become good, and 
the prodigal return home ; and He loved men, not 
only for what they were, but for what they might be. 

It would be easy to show that this high 
doctrine of man underlies, and is involved in, 
the whole life and work and teaching of Jesus. 
It is involved in the doctrine of God. Indeed, as 
Dr. Dale says, the Christian doctrine of man is 



Concerning Man 103 

really a part of the Christian doctrine of God.^ 
Because God is a Father, every man is a son of 
God, or, rather, every man has within him the 
capacity for sonship. It is involved in the 
doctrine of the Incarnation ; that stupendous fact 
reveals not only the condescension of God but 
the glory and exaltation of man. If God could 
become man, there must be a certain kinship 
between God and man ; since God has become 
man, our poor human nature has been thereby 
lifted up and glorified. The same great doctrine 
is implied in the truth of Christ's atonement. 
When He who knew Himself to be the eternal Son 
of God spoke of His own life as the " ransom " for 
the forfeited lives of men, He revealed once more 
how infinite is the worth of that which could be 
redeemed only at such tremendous cost. 

Such, then, is Christ's teaching about man. 
And, as I have already said, it was a new thing 
in human history. Nowhere is the line which 
divides the world B.C. from the world A.D. more 
sharply defined than here. Before Christ came, 
no one dared to say, for no one believed, that the 
soul of every man, and still less the soul of every 
woman and child, was of worth to God, that even 
a slave might become a son of the Most High. 
But Christ believed it, and Christ said it, and 
when He said it, the new world, the world in 
which we live, began to be. The great difference 
between ancient and modern civilizations, one 

^ Felloivship with Christ, p. 157, 



I04 The Teaching of Jesus 

eminent historian has said, is to be found here, 
that while ancient civilization cared only for the 
welfare of the favoured few, modern civilization 
seeks the welfare of all. And when we ask 
further what has made the difference, history 
sends us back for answer to the four Gospels and 
the teaching of Jesus concerning the infinite worth 
of the soul of man. 



II 

And now, to bring matters to a practical 
issue, have we who profess the faith of Christ 
learnt to set, either upon others or upon ourselves, 
the value which Christ put upon all men ? Far 
as we have travelled from ancient Greece and 
Rome, are we not still, in our thoughts about 
men, often pagan rather than Christian ? Our 
very speech bewrayeth us, and shows how little 
even yet we have learnt to think Christ's thoughts 
after Him. He declared, in words which have 
already been quoted, that " a man's life consisteth 
not in the abundance of the things which he 
possesseth." Nevertheless, in our daily speech 
we persist in measuring men by this very 
standard ; we say that a man " is worth " so 
much, though, of course, all that we mean is 
that he has so much. Again, we allow ourselves 
to speak about the " hands " in a factory, as if 
with the hand there went neither head nor heart. 
If we must put a part for the whole, why should 



Concern ing Man 105 

it not be after the fashion of the New Testament ? 
" And there were added unto them in that day " 
— so it is written in one place- — " about three 
thousand souls " — " souls," not " hands." ^ And 
we may depend upon it there would be less soul- 
less labour in the world, and fewer men and 
women in danger of degenerating into mere 
" hands," if we would learn to think of them in 
Christ's higher and worthier way. 

Let me try to show, by two or three examples, 
how Christ's teaching about man is needed 
through all our life. 

(i) There was, perhaps, never a time when 
so many were striving to fulfil the apostle's 
injunction, and, as they have opportunity, to do 
good unto all men. More and more we busy 
ourselves to-day with the good works of philan- 
thropy and Christian charity. And what we 
must remember is that our philanthropy needs 
our theology to sustain it. They only will con- 
tinue Christ's work for man who cherish Christ's 
thoughts about man. Sever philanthropy from 
the great Christian ideas which have created 
and sustained it, and it will very speedily come 
to an end of its resources. All experience shows 
that philanthropy cut off from Christ has not 
capital enough on which to do its business. 
And the reason is not far to seek. They who 
strive to save their fellows, they who go down 
into the depths that they may lift men up, see 
' See Trench's Study of Words ^ p. lOO. 



io6 The Teaching of Jesus 

so much of the darkened under-side of human 
life, they are brought so close up to the ugly- 
facts of human baseness, human trickery, human 
ingratitude, that, unless there be behind them 
the staying, steadying power of the faith and 
love of Christ, they cannot long endure the strain ; 
they grow weary in well-doing, perchance even 
they grow bitter and contemptuous, and in a 
little while the tasks they have taken up fall 
unfinished from their hands. " Society " takes 
to " slumming " for a season — just as for another 
season it may take to ping-pong — but the fit 
does not last ; and only they keep on through 
the long, grey days, when neither sun nor stars 
are seen, who have learnt to look on men with 
the eyes, and to feel toward them with the 
heart, of Jesus the Man of Nazareth. 

(2) "Whoso shall cause one of these little 
ones that believe on Me to stumble, it is profitable 
for him that a great mill-stone should be hanged 
about his neck, and that he should be sunk in 
the depth of the sea." Once more is revealed 
Christ's thought of the worth of the soul. How 
the holy passion against him who would hurt 
" one of these little ones " glows and scorches 
in His words ! Is this a word for any of us ? 
Is there one among us who is tempting a brother 
man to dishonesty, to drink, to lust ; who is 
pushing some thoughtless girl down the steep 
and slippery slope which ends — we know where ? 
Then let him stop and listen, not to me, but to 



Concerning Man \o^ 

Christ. Never, I think, did He speak with such 
solemn, heart-shaking emphasis, and He says that 
it were better a man should die, that he should 
die this night, die the most miserable and shame- 
ful death, than that he should bring the blood of 
another's soul upon his head. It must needs be 
that occasions of stumbling come, but woe, woe 
to that man by whom they come, when he and 
the slain soul's Saviour shall stand face to face ! 
Oh, if there be one among us who is playing the 
tempter, and doing the devil's work, let him get 
to his knees, and cry with the conscience-smitten 
Psalmist, " Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O 
God, Thou God of my salvation " ; and peradven- 
ture even yet He may hear and have mercy. 

(3) Let fathers and mothers ponder what this 
teaching of Jesus concerning man means for them 
in relation to their children. There came into 
your home a while ago a little child, a gift from 
God, just such a babe as Jesus Himself was in 
His mother's arms in Bethlehem. The child is 
yours, bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh, and 
it bears your likeness and image ; but it is also 
God's child, and it bears His image. What 
difference is the coming of the little stranger 
making in you ? I do not ask what difference 
is it making to you, for the answer would be 
ready in a moment, " Much, every way " ; but, 
what difference is it making in you ? Does it 
never occur to you that you ought to be a 
different man — a better man — that you ought 



io8 The Teaching of Jesus 

to be a different woman — a better woman — for 
the sake of the little one lying in the cradle? 
Do you know that of all the things God ever 
made and owns, in this or all His worlds, there 
is nothing more dear to Him than the soul of 
the little child He has committed to your hands ? 
What hands those should be that bear a gift like 
that ! Perhaps we never thought of it in that 
way before. But it is true, whether we think 
of it or not. Is it not time to begin to think 
of it ? This night, as we stand over our sleeping 
child, let us promise to God, for the child's sake, 
that we will be His. 

(4) Last of all, we must learn to set Christ's 
value upon ourselves. This is the tragedy of 
life, that we hold ourselves so cheap. We are 
sprung of heaven's first blood, have titles manifold, 
and yet, when the crown is offered us, we choose 
rather, like the man with the muck-rake, in 
Bunyan's great allegory, to grub among the dust 
and sticks and straws of the floor. In the times 
of the French Revolution, French soldiers, it is 
said, stabled their horses in some of the magnifi- 
cent cathedrals of France ; but some of us are 
guilty of a far worse sacrilege in that holy of 
holies which we call the soul. " Ye were re- 
deemed, not with corruptible things, with silver 
or gold," but with blood, precious blood, even the 
blood of Christ. And the soul which cost that, 
we are ready to sell any day in the open market 
for a little more pleasure or a little more pelf 



Concerning Man 109 

The birthright is bartered for the sorriest mess of 
pottage, and the jewel which the King covets to 
wear in His crown our own feet trample in the 
mire of the streets. The pity of it, the pity of it ! 
In one of Dora Greenwell's simple and beauti- 
ful Songs of Salvation^ a pitman tells to his 
wife the story of his conversion. He had got 
a word like a fire in his heart that would not 
let him be, "Jesus, the Son of God, who loved, 
and who gave Himself for me." 

" It was for me that Jesus died ! for me, and a world 

of men, 
Just as sinful, and just as slow to give back His love 

again ; 
And He didn't wait till I came to Him, but He loved 

me at my worst ; 
He needn't ever have died for me if I could have 

loved Him first." 

And then he continues : — 

"And could' St Thou love such a man as me, my 
Saviour ! Then I'll take 
More heed to this wand'ring soul of mine, if it's only 
for Thy sake." 

Yes, we are all of worth to God, but we must 
needs go to the Cross to learn how great is our 
worth ; and, as we bow in its sacred shadow, 
may we learn to say : " For Thy sake, O Christ, 
for Thy sake, I'll take more heed to this wander- 
ing soul of mine." ^ 

1 The chapter entitled " Christ's Doctrine of Man " is one of 
the most suggestive chapters in Dr. Bruce's admirable work The 
Kingdom of God. 



CONCERNING SIN 



III 



' O MAN, strange composite of heaven and earth ! 

Majesty dwarfed to baseness ! fragrant flower 
Running to poisonous seed ! and seeming worth 

Choking corruption ! weakness mastering power ! 
Who never art so near to crime and shame, 
As when thou hast achieved some deed of name." 

Newman. 



VIII 

CONCERNING SIN 

«* When ye pray ^ say, , , . For^ve us our sins,*^ — LuKE xi. 2, 4. 

A RECENT writer has pointed out that sin, 
like death, is not seriously realized except 
as a personal fact We really know it only when 
we know it about ourselves. The word " sin " has 
no serious meaning to a man, except when it 
means that he himself is a sinful man. And 
hence it comes to pass that we can still turn 
to the penitential Psalms, to the seventh chapter 
of Romans, to the Confessions of St. Augustine, or 
to the Grace Abounding of John Bunyan, and 
make their words the language of our own 
broken and contrite hearts. For when Bunyan 
and Augustine and Paul and the psalmists spoke 
of sin, they spoke not the thoughts of others, 
but their knowledge of themselves ; they looked 
into their own hearts and wrote. That is why 
their words " find " us to-day. Neverthless, para- 
dox though it may seem, our greatest Teacher 
concerning sin. Himself "knew no sin." Bom 
without sin, living and dying without sin, Christ 
113 I 



114 The Teaching of Jesus 

yet " knew what was in man," knew the sin that 
was in man, and from His own sinless height 
once for all revealed and judged and condemned 
it. Let us seek, then, to learn the mind of Christ 
on this great matter. 

And once more, as 1 have had occasion to 
point out in a previous chapter, we must not look 
for anything formal, defined, systematic in Christ's 
teaching. We cannot open the Gospels, as we 
might some modern theological treatise, and 
read out from them a scientific exposition of sin 
— its origin, its nature, its treatment. The New 
Testament is not like a museum, where the 
flowers are dried and pressed, and the fossils lie 
carefully arranged within glass cases, and every- 
thing is duly classified and labelled. Rather it is 
like nature itself, where the flowers grow wild at 
our feet, and the rocks lie as the Creator's hand 
left them, and where each man must do the 
classifying and labelling for himself. Museums 
have their uses, and there will always be those 
who prefer them — they save so much trouble. 
But since Christ's aim was not to save us trouble, 
but to teach us to see things with our own eyes, 
to see them as He saw them, and to think of 
them as He thinks, it is no wonder that He has 
chosen rather to put us down in the midst of a 
world of living truths than in a museum of 
assorted and dead facts. 



Concerning Sin 115 

I 

What, then, is the teaching of Jesus con- 
cerning sin ? His tone is at once severe and 
hopeful. Sometimes His words are words that 
shake our hearts with fear ; sometimes they 
surprise us with their overflowing tenderness 
and pity. But however He may deal with the 
sinner, we are always made to feel that to Jesus 
sin is a serious thing, a problem not to be slurred 
over and made light of, but to be faced, and met, 
and grappled with. Christ's sense of the gravity 
of sin comes out in many ways. 

(i) It is involved in His doctrine of man. He 
who made so much of man could not make light 
of man's sin. It is because man is so great that 
his sin is so grave. No one can understand the 
New Testament doctrine of sin who does not read it 
in the light of the New Testament doctrine of man. 
When we think of man as Christ thought of him, 
when we see in him the possibilities which Christ 
saw, the Scripture language concerning sin be- 
comes intelligible enough ; until then it may 
easily seem exaggerated and unreal. It is the 
height for which man was made and meant which 
measures the fall which is involved in his sin. 

(2) Call to mind the language in which Christ 
set forth the effects of sin. He spoke of men as 
blind, as sick, as dead ; He said they were as 
sheep gone astray, as sons that are lost, as men in 
debt which they can never pay, in bondage from 



1 1 6 The Teaching of Jesus 

which they can never free themselves. The 
very accumulation of metaphors bears witness to 
Christ's sense of the havoc wrought by sin. Nor 
are they metaphors merely ; they are His reading 
of the facts of life as it lay before Him. Let me 
refer briefly to two of them, {a) Christ spoke of 
men as in bondage through their sin. " If," He 
said once, " ye abide in My word ... ye shall know 
the truth, and the truth shall make you free." 
And straightway jealous Jewish ears caught at 
that word "free." "Free?" they cried, " Free ? 
we be Abraham's seed, and have never yet been 
in bondage to any man : how sayest Thou, Ye 
shall be made free ? " Yet even as they lift their 
hands in protest Christ hears the clink of their 
fetters : " Verily, verily, I say unto you, every 
one that committeth sin is the bond-servant — 
the slave — of sin." " To whom ye present your- 
selves as servants unto obedience, his servants — 
his slaves — ye are whom ye obey ; whether of sin 
unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness." 
Apostle and Lord mean the same thing, true of 
us as it was true of the Jews : " Every one that 
committeth sin is the slave of sin." (J?) Further, 
Christ says, men are in debt through their sin. 
In one parable He tells us of a certain lender who 
had two debtors ; the one owed five hundred 
pence, and the other fifty ; but neither had where- 
with to pay. In another parable we hear of a 
servant who owed his lord ten thousand talents — 
a gigantic sum, vague in its vastness, " millions " 



Concerning Sm 117 

as we might say — and he Hkewise had not where- 
with to pay. Further, in the application of each 
parable, it is God to whom this unpayable debt is 
due. Now, it is just at this point that our sense 
of sin to-day is weakest. The scientist, the 
dramatist, the novelist are all proclaiming our 
responsibility toward them that come after us ; 
with pitiless insistence they are telling us that the 
evil that men do lives after them, that it is not done 
with when it is done. Yet, with all this, there 
may be no thought of God. It is the conscious- 
ness not merely of responsibility, but of responsi- 
bility God-ward, which needs to be strengthened. 
When we sin we may wrong others much, we may 
wrong ourselves more, but we wrong God most of 
all ; and we shall never recover Christ's thought 
of sin until, like the psalmist and the prodigal, we 
have learned to cry to Him, " Against Thee have 
I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight." 
(3) But sin, in Christ's view of it, is not merely 
something a man does, it is what he is. Go 
through Paul's long and dismal catalogue of " the 
works of the flesh " : " Fornication, uncleanness, 
lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, 
jealousies, wraths, factions, divisions, heresies, 
envyings, drunkenness, revellings, and such like." 
Yet even this is not the whole of the matter. 
Sin is more than the sum -total of man's sins. 
The fruits are corrupt because the tree which 
yields them is corrupt ; the stream is tainted 
because the fountain whence it flows is impure ; 



1 1 8 The Teaching of Jestis 

man commits sin because he is sinful. It was 
just here that Christ broke, and broke decisively, 
with the traditional religion of His time. To the 
average Jew of that day righteousness and sin 
meant nothing more than the observance or the 
non-oDservance of certain religious traditions. 
" For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they 
wash their hands diligently, eat not, holding the 
tradition of the elders : and when they come from 
the market-place, except they wash themselves, 
they eat not ; and many other things there be 
which they have received to hold, washings of cups, 
and pots, and brazen vessels. " Nay," said Jesus, 
"you are beginning at the wrong end, you are 
concerned about the wrong things, for from with- 
in, out of the heart of men, evil thoughts proceed, 
fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetings, 
wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, rail- 
ing, pride, foolishness : all these evil things 
proceed from within." Deep in the heart of man 
evil has its seat, and until that is touched nothing 
is done. 

(4) And, lastly, Christ says all men are sinful. 
Of course. He did not say, nor did He imply that 
all are equally sinful. On the contrary. He said 
plainly that whereas the debt of some is as fifty 
pence, the debt of others is as five hundred pence. 
Neither did Christ teach that man is wholly sinful, 
in the sense that there is in man nothing that is 
good, or that every man is by nature as bad as he 
can be. Nor, let it be said in passing, is this what 



Concerning Sin 1 1 9 

theology means when it speaks, as it still sometimes 
does, about the " total depravity " of human nature. 
What is meant is, as Dr. Denney says, that the 
depravity which sin has produced in human nature 
extends to the whole of it.^ If I poison my finger, 
it is not only the finger that is poisoned ; the 
poison is in the blood, and, unless it be got rid 
of, not my finger merely, but my life is in peril. 
And in like manner the sin which taints my 
nature taints my whole nature, perverting the con- 
science, enfeebling the will, and darkening the 
understanding. But with whatever qualifications 
Christ's indictment is against the whole human 
race. He never discusses the origin of sin, but 
He always assumes its presence. No matter how 
His hearers might vary, this factor remained con- 
stant "If ye, being evil " — -that mournful pre- 
supposition could be made everywhere. He spoke 
of men as " lost," and said that He had come to 
seek and save them. He summoned men, without 
distinction, to repentance. He spoke of His blood 
as " shed for many unto remission of sins." The 
gospel which, in His name, was to be preached 
unto all the nations was concerning " repentance 
and remission of sins." Even His own disciples 
He taught, as they prayed, to say, " Forgive us 
our sins." And though it is true He se^id once 
that He had not come to call the righteous but 
sinners to repentance, He did not thereby mean 
to suggest that there really are some righteous 

* Studies in Theology^ p. 83. 



I20 The Teaching of Jesus 

persons who have no need of repentance ; rather 
was He seeking by the keenness of His Divine 
irony to pierce the hard self-satisfaction of men 
whose need was greater just because it was 
unfelt. 

" All have sinned ; " but once more let us re- 
mind ourselves, sin is not seriously realized except 
as a personal fact. The truth must come home 
as a truth about ourselves. The accusing finger 
singles men out and fastens the charge on each 
several conscience : " Thou art the man ! " And 
as the accusation is individual, so, likewise, must 
the acknowledgment be. It is not enough that 
in church we cry in company, " Lord have mercy 
upon us, miserable offenders " ; each must learn 
to pray for himself, " God be merciful to me a 
sinner." Then comes the word of pardon, per- 
sonal and individual as the condemnation, " The 
Lord also hath put away thy sin." 

II 

In what has been said thus far I have dwelt, 
for the most part, on the sterner and darker aspects 
of Christ's teaching about sin. And, as every 
student of contemporary literature knows, there 
are voices all around us to-day ready to take up 
and emphasize every word of His concerning the 
mischief wrought by moral evil. Take, e.g.^ a 
passage like this from Thomas Hardy's powerful 
but sombre story, Tess : — 



Concerning Sin 121 

" Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess ?" 

" Yes." 

"All like ours?" 

" I don't know ; but I think so. They sometimes seem 
to me like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them 
splendid and sound — a few blighted." 

"Which do we live on — a splendid one, or a blighted 
one?" 

"A blighted one." 

Or, turn to the works of George Eliot. No pro- 
phet of righteousness ever bound sin and its con- 
sequences more firmly together, or proclaimed 
with more solemn emphasis the certainty of the 
evil-doer's doom. " Our deeds are like children 
that are born to us," she says ; " nay, children may 
be strangled, but deeds never " — this is the note 
one hears through all her books. If we have 
done wrong, it is in vain we cry for mercy. We 
are taken by the throat and delivered over to 
the tormentors until we have paid the uttermost 
farthing. 

" The Moving Finger writes ; and, having writ, 
Moves on : nor all your Piety nor Wit 

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, 
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it." 

And this is all that writers such as these have 
to say to us. Retribution they know, but not 
Redemption. " There are no arresting angels in 
the path" — only the Angel of Justice with the 
drawn sword. 

But this is not the teaching of Jesus concern- 
ing sin. He is not blind, and if we give ear to 



12 2 The Teaching of Jesus 

Him He will not suffer us to be blind, either to 
its character or its consequences ; but He says 
that sin can be forgiven, and its iron bondage 
broken. Jesus believed in the recoverability of 
man at his worst. It is a fact significant of much 
that the first mention of sin in the New Testa- 
ment is in a prophecy of its destruction : " Thou 
shalt call His name Jesus ; for it is He that shall 
save His people from their sins." And throughout 
the first three Gospels sin is named almost ex- 
clusively in connection with its forgiveness.^ What 
Christ hath joined together let no man put asunder. 
Herein is the very gospel of God, that Christ 
came not to condemn the world, but that the 
world, through Him, might be saved. " Do you 
know what Christ would say to you, my girl ? " 
said a missionary to a poor girl dying. " He 
would say, ' Thy sins are forgiven thee.' " " Would 
He, though, would He ? " she cried, starting up ; 
" take me to Him, take me to Him." Yes, thank 
God, we know what to do with our sin ; we know 
what we must do to be saved. 

Let us go back again for a moment over the 
ground we have already travelled. We are in 
debt, with nothing to pay ; but Christ has taken 
the long account, and has crossed it through and 
through. We are in bondage, with no power to 
set ourselves free ; but Christ has come to rend 
the iron chain and proclaim deliverance to the 
captives. We are wrong, wrong within, wrong at 

^ See Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible^ Art. " Sin," vol. iii. p. 533. 



Concerning Sin 123 



the core ; but again He is equal to our need, for 
concerning Him it is written that He shall take 
away not only the " sins " but the " sin " of the 
world. Is anything too hard for Him ? Just as 
a lover of pictures will sometimes discover a por- 
trait, the work of an old master, marred and dis- 
figured by the dirt and neglect of years, and will 
patiently cleanse and retouch it, till the lips seem 
to speak again, and the old light shines in the 
eyes, and all its hidden glory is revealed once 
more, so does Christ bring out the Divine image, 
hidden but never lost, in the sinful souls of men. 
And all this He can do for all men ; for Christ 
knows no hopeless ones. 

One of the saddest sights in a great city is 
its hospital for incurables. Who can think but 
with a pang of pity and of pain of these — old 
men and little children joined in one sad fellow- 
ship — for whom the physician's skill has done 
its best and failed, for whom now nothing 
remains save to suffer and to die? But in 
the world's great hospital of ailing souls, where 
every day the Good Physician walks, there is no 
incurable ward. He lays His hands on the sick, 
and they are healed ; He touches the eyes of the 
bhnd, and they see ; unto the leper as white as 
snow his flesh comes again as the flesh of a little 
child ; even souls that are dead through their 
trespasses and sins He restores to life. But never, 
never does He turn away from any, saying, " Thou 
art too far gone ; there is nothing that I can do 



1 24 The Teaching of Jesus 

for thee." " I spake to Thy disciples," cried the 
father of the child which had a dumb spirit, " I 
spake to Thy disciples that they should cast it 
out ; and they were not able." " Bring him unto 
Me," said Jesus. Then He rebuked the unclean 
spirit, saying unto him, " Thou dumb and deaf 
spirit, I command thee, come out of him and enter 
no more into him." Verily, with authority He 
commandeth even the unclean spirits and they 
obey Him. 

Therefore let us despair of no man ; therefore 
let no man despair of himself If we will, we 
can ; we can, because Christ will. " I was before," 
says St. Paul, " a blasphemer, and a persecutor, 
and injurious; howbeit I obtained mercy." "I 
am a wretched captive of sin," cries Samuel Ruther- 
ford, " yet my Lord can hew heaven out of worse 
timber." There is no unpardonable sin — none, at 
least, save the sin of refusing the pardon which 
avails for all sin. '* ' Mine iniquity is greater than 
can be forgiven.' ^ No, Cain, thou errest ; God's 
mercy is far greater, couldst thou ask mercy. 
Men cannot be more sinful than God is merciful 
if, with penitent hearts, they will call upon Him." 

We have all read of the passing of William 
MacLure in Ian Maclaren's touching idyll. " A'm 
gettin' drowsy," said the doctor to Drumsheugh, 
" read a bit tae me." Then Drumsheugh put on 
his spectacles, and searched for some comfortable 
■ Scripture. Presently he began to read : " In My 
1 This is the R.V. marginal rendering of Gen. iv. 13. 



Concerning Sin 125 

Father's house are many mansions ; " but MacLure 
stopped him. " It's a bonnie word," he said, " but 
it's no* for the like o' me. It's ower guid ; a* 
daurna tak' it." Then he bid Drumsheugh shut 
the book and let it open of itself, and he would 
find the place where he had been reading every 
night for the last month. Drumsheugh did as he 
was bidden, and the book opened at the parable 
wherein the Master tells what God thinks of a 
Pharisee and a penitent sinner. And when he 
came to the words, " And the publican, standing 
afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes to 
heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God 
be merciful to me a sinner," once more the dying 
man stopped him : " That micht hae been written 
for me, Paitrick, or ony ither auld sinner that hes 
feenished his life, an' hes naething tae say for 
himsel." 

Nothing to say for ourselves — that is what it 
comes to, when we know the truth about ourselves. 
And when at last our mouth is stopped, when our 
last poor plea is silenced, when with penitent and 
obedient hearts we seek the mercy to which from 
the first we have been utterly shut up, then 
indeed we 

" have found the ground wherein 
Sure our soul's anchor may remain." 

" Not by works done in righteousness, which 
we did ourselves, but according to His mercy He 
saved us." 



CONCERNING RIGHTEOUSNESS 



127 



" I spend my whole life in going about and persuading you all 
to give your first and chiefest care to the. perfection of your souls, 
and not till you have done that to think of your bodies, or your 
wealth ; and telling you that virtue does not come from wealth, but 
that wealth, and every other good thing which men have, whether 
in public, or in private, comes from virtue." — Socrates. 



128 



IX 

CONCERNING RIGHTEOUSNESS 

^^ Seek ye first . . . His righteousness,'''' — Matt. vi. 33. 

RIGHTEOUSNESS, as it was understood and 
taught by Christ, inckides the two things 
which we often distinguish as religion and morality. 
It is right-doing, not only as between man and 
man, but as between man and God. The Law- 
giver of the New Testament, like the lawgiver of 
the Old, has given to us two tables of stone. On 
the one He has written, " Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy 
soul, and with all thy mind " ; and on the other, 
" Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." In 
these two commandments the whole law is summed 
up, the whole duty of man is made known. It is 
well to emphasize this two-fold aspect of the truth 
at a time when we are often tempted to define 
religion wholly in the terms of morality, and, while 
insisting on the duties which we owe to each other, to 
forget those which we owe to God. If there be a 
God righteousness must surely have a meaning in 
relation to Him ; it cannot be simply another 
129 K 



130 The Teaching of Jesus 

name for philanthropy. Christ at least will not 
call that man just and good who does right to all 
except his Maker. In the Christian doctrine of 
the good life room must be found for God. At 
the present moment, however, it is the subject in 
its man-ward aspect that I wish specially to keep 
in view, partly because some limitation is obviously 
necessary, and partly also because it is this of 
which Christ Himself had most to say. 



What, then, is Christ's idea of righteousness? 
In other words, what did He teach concerning the 
good life ? Now here also, as in His teaching 
about God, Christ did not need to begin de novo. 
Those to whom He spoke had already their own 
ideals of duty and holiness. True, these were 
sadly in need of revision and correction. Never- 
theless, such as they were, they were there, and 
Christ could use them as His starting-point. 
Consequently, therefore, we find His ideas of 
righteousness defined largely by contrast with 
existing ideas. " It was said to them of old time 
. . . but I say untojF^;/." This is the note heard 
all through the Sermon on the Mount. The con- 
trast may be stated in two ways. 

(l) In the first place, Christ said that the 
righteousness of His disciples must exceed that 
of publicans and heathen : " If ye love them that 
love you, what reward have ye ? Do not even 



Concerning Righteousness 131 

the publicans the same ? And if ye salute your 
brethren only, what do ye more than others ? 
Do not even the Gentiles the same ? " There 
are virtues exhibited in the lives of even wholly 
irreligious men. There are rudimentary moral 
principles which they that know not God never- 
theless acknowledge and obey. It was so in 
Christ's time ; it is so still. The popular American 
ballad, "Jim Bludso," and Ian Maclaren's touching 
story of the Drumtochty postman, are familiar 
illustrations of self-sacrificing virtues revealed by 
men of coarse and vicious lives. Nor ought we 
to deny the reality of such virtues ; still less ought 
we to follow the bad example of St. Augustine 
and call them " splendid vices." Such was not 
Christ's way. He assumed the existence and 
reality of this " natural goodness," and with familiar 
illustrations of it on His tongue turned upon His 
disciples with the question, " What do ye more } " 
" What do ye more ? " Yet in some respects, 
it is to be feared, the morality of the Church 
sometimes falls behind that of the world. One 
of the most painful passages in St. Paul's epistles 
is that in which he tells the Corinthian Christians 
that one of their own number had been guilty of 
immorality such as would have shocked even the 
conscience of an unbelieving Gentile. And it was 
but the other day that I came across this sentence 
from the pen of an observant and friendly critic 
of contemporary religious life : " I am afraid," he 
said, " it must be admitted that the idea of honour, 



132 The Teaching of Jesus 

though in itself an essential part of Christian 
ethics, is much stronger outside the Churches than 
within them." How far facts justif}^ the criticism 
I will not stay to inquire ; but the very fact that 
a charge like this can be made should prove a 
sharp reminder to us of the stringency of the 
demands which Jesus Christ makes upon us. 
There is no kind of sound moral fruit which is to 
be found anywhere in the wide fields of the world 
which He does not look for in richer and riper 
abundance within the garden of His Church. 

A great Christian preacher has given an admir- 
able illustration of one way in which we may 
examine ourselves in this matter. He has grouped 
together a number of precepts from the writings 
of some of the great heathen moralists, such as 
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and then has 
urged the question how far we who profess to be 
the disciples of a loftier faith are true even to 
these ancient heathen ideals.-^ Perhaps, however, 
this is not a method of self-examination which 
is open to us all. But this, at least, we can 
do : we can test ourselves by that moral law, 
which God gave to the Jews by Moses, and 
which Christ reinterpreted in the Sermon on the 
Mount. " Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not 
commit adultery " — all these commandments in 
their literal meaning we must observe ; yet this is 
not enough ; " do not even the publicans the 
same ? " and Christ's demand is, " What do ye 

^ R. W. Dale, Evangelical Revival atid other Sertiions, p. 66 ff. 



Concerning Righteousness 133 

more than others ? " The murderous thought, 
Christ says, that is murder ; the lustful look, that 
is adultery. " Ye have heard that it was said, 
Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine 
enemy : but I say unto you. Love your enemies, 
and pray for them that persecute you." As we 
listen to words like these must not we also confess, 
" Either these sayings are not Christ's, or we are 
not Christians " ? 

(2) Christ's idea of righteousness is further 
defined by contrast with that of the Pharisees : 
" Except your righteousness shall exceed the 
righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall 
in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." 
What was the Pharisees' idea of religion ? Let 
us take the words which Christ Himself put into 
the lips of a representative of his class : " God, I 
thank Thee, that I am not as the rest of men, 
extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this 
publican. I fast twice in the week ; I give tithes 
of all that I get." This is a full-length portrait 
of the finished Pharisee. Religion to him was a 
round of prescribed ritual, a barren externalism, a 
subjection to the dominion of the letter, which 
never touched the heart, nor bowed the spirit 
down in penitence and humility before God. The 
Pharisee's whole concern was with externals ; but 
Christ declared that he who is only right outwardly 
is not right at all. There is no such thing, He 
said, as goodness which is not from within. The 
alms-deeds, the prayer, the fasting of the Pharisee 



1 34 The Teaching of Jesus 

were all done before men, to be seen of them ; and 
so long as that which men saw was right and 
seemly, he was satisfied. But Christ went back 
behind the outward act to the heart. A man is 
really, He said, what he is there. You may hang 
grapes on a thorn-bush, that will not make it 
a vine ; you may put a sheep's fleece on a wolfs 
back, but that will not change its wolfish heart. 
And men are what they are within. Just as to 
get good fruit you must first of all make the tree 
good, so to secure good deeds you must first make 
good men. This was the truth which Pharisaism 
ignored ; with what results all the world knows. 
In the long history of man, it remains, perhaps, 
the supreme illustration of the fatal facility with 
which religion and morality are divorced when 
once the emphasis is laid upon the outward and 
ceremonial instead of the inward and spiritual. 
All experience helps us to understand how the 
system works. There is no deliberate intention 
of setting ritual above righteousness, but it is so 
much easier to count one's beads than to curb 
one's temper, so much easier to fast in Lent than 
to be unswervingly just, that if once the easier 
thing gets attached to it an exaggerated import- 
ance, fidelity in it is allowed to atone for laxity in 
greater things, and the last result is Pharisaism, 
where we see conscience concerned about the 
tithing of garden herbs, but with no power over 
the life, and religion not merely tolerating but 
actually ministering to moral evil. It was in 



Concerning Righteousness 135 

the name of religion that the Pharisees suffered a 
man to violate even the sanctities of the Fifth 
Commandment, and to do dishonour to his father 
and mother. The righteous man in their eyes 
was not he who loved mercy, and did justly, and 
walked humbly with his God, but he who observed 
the traditions of the elders. So that, as Professor 
Bruce says,^ it was possible for a man to comply 
with all the requirements of the Rabbis and yet 
remain in heart and life an utter miscreant. 
" Outwardly," said Christ, " ye appear righteous 
unto men, but inwardly ye are full of hypocrisy 
and iniquity," Is it any wonder that He should 
call down fire from heaven to consume a system 
which had yielded such bitter, poisonous fruits as 
these ? 

But let us remember, as Mozley well says,^ 
there are no extinct species in the world of evil. 
The value for us of Christ's condemnation lies in 
this, that it is a permanent tendency of human 
nature which He is condemning. Pharisaism is 
not dead. Have I not seen the Pharisee dressed 
in good broad-cloth and going to church with his 
Bible under his arm ? And have I not seen him 
sitting in church and reading the twenty-third 
chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, and thinking to 
himself what shockingly wicked people these men 
must have been of whom Christ spoke such 

1 The Kingdom of God, p. 203. 

2 In his famous sermon on the Pharisees, University Sermons^ 
p. 32. 



1 36 The Teaching of Jesus 

terrible words, and never once supposing that 
there is anything in the chapter that concerns 
him ? No, Pharisaism is not dead ; and when 
we read of those who devoured widows' houses 
and for a pretence made long prayers, using their 
religion as a cloak for their villainy, let us re- 
member that Christ says to His disciples to-day, 
even as He said to them centuries ago, " Except 
your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness 
of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise 
enter into the kingdom of heaven." 

II 

Thus far we have considered Christ's idea of 
righteousness only in contrast with other ideas. 
When we seek to define it in itself we fall back 
naturally on the words of the two great com- 
mandments which have already been quoted : 
" Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy 
mind ; " and " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as 
thyself." Righteousness, Christ says, is love, love 
to God and love to man. 

But to them of old time it was said, " Thou 
shalt love thy neighbour." Where, then, is the 
difference between the old commandment and the 
new ? It lies in the new definition of " neigh- 
bour." The old law which said, " Thou shalt 
love thy neighbour," said also, " and hate thine 
enemy " ; which meant that some are and some 



Concerning Righteousjiess 137 

are not our neighbours, and that toward those 
who are not love has no obligations. But Christ 
broke down for ever the middle wall of partition, 
and declared the old distinction null and void. 
In His parable of the Good Samaritan He taught 
that every man is our neighbour who has need of 
us, and to whom it is possible for us to prove 
ourselves a friend. As we have opportunity we 
are to do good unto all men. The same lesson 
with, if possible, still greater emphasis, Christ 
taught in the Upper Room : " A new command- 
ment I give unto you, that ye love one another ; 
even as I have loved you, that ye also love 
one another." A love that goes all the way 
with human need, that gives not itself by measure, 
that is not chilled by indifference, nor thwarted by 
ingratitude, that fights against evil until it over- 
comes it — such was the love He gave, and such 
is the love He asks. And in that command all 
other commands are comprehended. Christ might 
have made His own the daring word of St. 
Augustine, " Love, and do what you like." 

When first men heard this law of the heavenly 
righteousness how wondrous simple it must have 
seemed in contrast with the elaborate scribe- 
made law which their Rabbis laid upon them. 
Pharisaism had reduced religion to a branch of 
mechanics, a vast network of rules which closed 
in the life of man on every side, a burden grievous 
and heavy to be borne, which crushed the soul 
under its weary load. This was the yoke of 



138 The Teaching of Jesus 

which Peter said that neither they nor their 
fathers were able to bear it. Was it any marvel 
that from such a system men should turn to Him 
who cried, " Take My yoke upon you, and learn 
of Me ; for My yoke is easy, and My burden is 
light " ? But if Christ's law of love is simpler it 
is also far more exacting than the old law which 
it superseded. It has meshes far finer than any 
that Pharisaic ingenuity could weave. Rabbinical 
law can secure the tithing of mint and anise and 
cummin, the washing of cups and pots, and many 
such like things ; it can regulate the life of ritual 
and outward observance ; and after that it has no 
more that it can do. But Christ's law of love is 
a mentor that searches out the deep things of 
man. The inside of the cup and platter, the 
things that are within, the hidden man of the 
heart — it is on these its eyes are fixed. It gives 
heed both to the words of the mouth and the 
meditations of the heart. And, sometimes, when 
the lips are speaking fair, suddenly it will fling 
open the heart's door and show us where, in some 
secret chamber, Greed and Pride and Envy and 
Hate sit side by side in unblest fellowship. Verily 
this law of love is living and active, sharper than 
any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing 
of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, quick 
to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart. 

There is no room to do more than mention 
the fact which crowns the revelation of this new 
law of righteousness, Christ's words about good- 



Concerning Righteousness 1 39 

ness do not come to us alone ; they come united 
with a life which is their best exposition. Christ 
is all His followers are to be ; in Him the 
righteousness of the kingdom is incarnate. From 
henceforth the righteous man is the Christ-like 
man. The standard of human Hfe is no longer a 
code but a character ; for the gospel does not put 
us into subjection to fresh laws ; it calls us to 
" the study of a living Person, and the following 
of a living Mind." ^ And when to Jesus we bring 
the old question, " Good Master, what shall I do 
that I may inherit eternal life } " He does not 
now repeat the commandments, but He says, " If 
thou wouldest be perfect, follow Me, learn of Me, 
do as I have done to you, love as I have loved 
you." 

Ill 

Such, then, is the good life which Christ 
reveals, and to which He calls us. To say that 
to Him we owe our highest ideal of righteousness, 
is only to affirm what no one now seriously denies. 
John Stuart Mill has, it is true, alleged certain 
defects against Christianity as an ethical system, 
yet Mill himself has frankly admitted that " it 
would not be easy now, even for an unbeliever, 
to find a better translation of the rule of virtue 
from the abstract to the concrete, than to en- 
deavour so to live that Christ would approve our 
life." If Christ be not our one Master in the 

1 R. W. Church, Gifts of Civilisation^ P* 71' 



140 The Teaching of Jesus 

moral world, it will at least be soon enough to 
discuss a rival's claims when he appears ; as yet 
there is no sign of him. But the point I am 
most anxious to emphasize just now is not simply 
that Jesus has put before us an ideal, the highest 
of its kind in the world, but that there is nothing 
of any kind to be desired before it. To be good 
as Christ was good, here in very truth is the 
suvnnuvi bomim of life, the greatest thing in the 
world, that which, before all other things, a man 
should seek to make his own. There are times, 
perhaps, in the lives of all of us when we are 
tempted to doubt it — times when the kingdoms 
of this world, the kingdoms of wealth and power 
and knowledge lie stretched at our feet, and the 
whispering fiend at our elbow bids us bow and 
enter in. But once again, if we be true men, the 
moment comes, 

"When the spirit's true endowments 
Stand out plainly from its false ones," 

when the sacred, saving faith in righteousness 
returns, and we know that Christ was right, that 
for ever and for ever it is true that better than to 
be rich, or to be clever, or to be famous, is it to 
be true, to be pure, to be good. 

Yes, goodness is the principal thing ; therefore 
get goodness, and with all thy getting — at the 
price of all that thou hast gotten (such is the true 
meaning of the words) ^ — get righteousness. Is 

1 Prov. iv. 7 : "Get wisdom; and with all thy getting get 
understanding," which does not mean simply, " Whatever else you 



Concerning Righteousness 141 

this what we are doing ? Goodness is the first 
thing ; are we putting it first ? Day by day are 
we saying to it, " Sit thou on my right hand," 
while we put all other things under our feet? 
" Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth 
if I remember thee not ; if I prefer not thee 
above my chief joy " — is this the kind of honour 
that we are paying to it ? " We make it our 
ambition," said St. Paul, " to be well pleasing 
unto Him." ^ Where this is the master ambition, 
all other lawful ambitions may be safely cherished 
and given their place. But if some lesser power 
rule, whose right it is not to reign over us, the end 
is chaos and night. " Seek ye first His righteous- 
ness ; " we subvert Christ's order at our peril. 
And this righteousness must be sought. As men 
seek wealth, as men seek knowledge, as men seek 
power, so must we seek goodness. "Wherefore 
giving all diligence " — in no other way can the 
pearl of great price be secured ; it does not lie by 
the roadside for any lounger to pick up. " With 
toil of heart and knees and hands," so only can 
the " path upward " and the prize be won. 
" Blessed," said Jesus, " are they that hunger and 
thirst after righteousness." Blessed, He meant, 
are they who long more than anything else to be 

get, be sure to get understanding." The marginal reference is to 
Matt, xiii, 44 : wisdom, like the pearl of great price, is to be 
secured with, i.e. at the cost and sacrifice of, everything else that 
can be gotten. (See J. R. Lumby on " Shortcomings of Transla- 
tion," Expositor^ second series, vol. iii. p. 203,) 
1 2 Cor. V. 9 R.V. margin. 



142 The Teaching of Jesus 

good ; for all such longing shall be abundantly 
satisfied. Exalt righteousness, and she shall 
promote thee ; she shall bring thee to honour 
when thou dost embrace her. She shall give to 
thine head a chaplet of grace ; a crown of beauty 
shall she deliver to thee. 

It is fitting that a chapter on righteousness 
should follow one on sin, for this may find some 
to whom the other made no appeal. At a 
meeting of Christian workers held some years ago 
in Glasgow, the chairman invited the late Professor 
Henry Drummond, who was present, though his 
name was not on the programme, to say a few 
words. He accepted the invitation, but said he 
would do no more than state a fact and ask a 
question. The fact was this, that in recent 
revival movements, in which he had had large 
experience, there were few indications of that 
deep and overwhelming conviction of sin which 
had been so characteristic a feature of similar 
revivals in past days. And this was the question. 
Did it mean that the Holy Spirit was in any way 
modifying the method of His operation ? What 
answer the wise men of the meeting gave to the 
Professor's question I do not know. But fact 
and question alike deserve to be carefully pondered. 
The Spirit, when He is come, Christ said, " will 
convict the world in respect of sin, and of 
righteousness, and of judgment." " Will convict 
the world of righteousness " — have we not some- 
times forgotten this? Have we not put the 



Concerning Righteousness 143 

full stop at " sin," as though the Holy Spirit's 
convicting work ended there? Nevertheless, 
there are many to-day whose religious life begins, 
not so much in a sense of their own sin and guilt 
and need, as rather in the consciousness of the 
glory and honour of Christ. It is what they find 
within themselves which brings some men to 
Christ ; it is what they find in Him which brings 
others. Some are driven by the strong hands of 
stern necessity ; some are wooed by the sweet 
constraint of the sinless Son of God. Some are 
crushed and broken and humbled to the dust, 
and their first cry is " God be merciful to me a 
sinner " ; some when they hear the call of Christ 
leap up to greet Him with a new light in their 
eyes and the glad confession on their lips, " Lord 
I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest." 

What, then, shall we say to these things ? 
What but this, " There are diversities of workings, 
but the same God, who worketh all things in all." 
Travellers to the same country do not always 
journey by the same route ; and for some of the 
heavenly pilgrims the Slough of Despond lies on 
the other side of the Wicket Gate. After all, it 
is of small moment what brings a man forth from 
the City of Destruction ; enough if he have come 
out and if now his face is set toward the city 
which hath the foundations, whose builder and 
maker is God. . 



CONCERNING PRAYER 



MS 



** Who seeketh finds : what shall be his relief 
Who hath no power to seek, no heart to pray, 
No sense of God, but bears as best he may, 
A lonely incommunicable grief? 
What shall he do ? One only thing he knows, 
That his life flits a frail uneasy spark 
In the great vast of universal dark, 
And that the grave may not be all repose. 
Be still, sad soul ! hft thou no passionate cry. 
But spread the desert of thy being bare 
To the full searching of the All-seeing eye : 
Wait — and through dark misgiving, blank despair, 
God will come down in pity, and fill the dry 
Dead plain with light, and life, and vernal air." 

J. C. Shairp. 



146 



X 

CONCERNING PRAYER 

** What man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask him for 
a loaf, will give him a stone ; or if he shall ask for a fish, will give 
him a serpent^ ^f y^ then, being evil, know how to give good gifts 
tmto your children, hoiv much more shall your Father ivhich is in 
heaven give good things to them that ask Him ? " — Matt. vii. 9-1 1, 

'^"T^HERE has been in our day much painful clis- 
J- putation concerning prayer and the laws 
of nature. Whole volumes have been written to 
prove that it is possible, or that it is impossible, 
for God to answer prayer. I am not going to 
thresh out again this dry straw just now. Dis- 
cussions of this kind have, undoubtedly, their 
place ; indeed, whether we will or no, they are 
often forced upon us by the conditions of the 
hour ; but they had no place in the teaching of 
Jesus, and I do not propose to say anything 
about them now. I wish rather, imitating as far 
as may be the gracious simplicity and directness 
of the argument of Jesus which we have just read, 
to gather up some of the practical suggestions 
touching this great matter which are strewn 
throughout the Gospels alike in the precepts and 
practice of our Lord. 

147 



148 The Teaching of JesMS 



I 

First of all, then, let us get fixed in our 
minds the saying of Jesus that " men ought 
always to pray and not to faint." The very form 
of the saying suggests that Christ knew how easy 
it is for us to faint and grow weary in our prayers. 
Men cease from prayer on many grounds. Some 
there are in whom the questioning, doubting 
spirit has grown so strong that for a time it has 
silenced even the cry of the heart for God. Some 
there are who are so busy, they tell us, that they 
have no time for prayer ; and after all, they ask, 
is not honest work the highest kind of prayer? 
And some there are who have ceased to pray, 
because they have been disappointed, because 
nothing seemed to come of their prayers. They 
asked but they did not receive, they sought but 
they did not find, they knocked but no door was 
opened to them ; there was neither voice, nor any 
to answer, nor any that regarded ; and now they 
ask, they seek, they knock no more. And some of 
us there are who do not pray because, as one of the 
psalmists says, our soul " cleaveth unto the dust." 
The things of God, the things of the soul, the 
things of eternity — what Paul calls " the things 
that are above " — are of no concern to us ; we 
have sold ourselves to work, to think, to live, for 
the things of the earth and the dust. 

Nevertheless, be the cause of our prayerless- 
ness what it may, Christ's word remains true. 



Concerning Pi^ayer 1 49 

Man made in the image of God ought always to 
pray and not to faint. And even more than by 
His words does Christ by His example prompt us 
to prayer. Turn, e.g., to the third Gospel. All the 
Evangelists show us Jesus at prayer ; but it is to 
Luke that we owe almost all our pictures of the 
kneeling Christ. Let us glance at them as they 
pass in quick succession before our eyes : 

"Jesus having been baptized, and praying, the 
heaven was opened" (iii. 21). 

" He withdrew Himself in the deserts, and 
prayed " (v. 1 6). 

" It came to pass in these days, that He went 
out into the mountain to pray ; and He continued 
all night in prayer to God " (vi. 1 2). 

" It came to pass, as He was praying alone, 
the disciples were with Him " (ix. 1 8). 

" It came to pass about eight days after these 
sayings. He took with Him Peter and John and 
James and went up into the mountain to pray. 
And as He was praying the fashion of His coun- 
tenance was altered, and His raiment became 
white and dazzling" (ix. 28, 29). 

" It came to pass, as He was praying in a 
certain place, that when He ceased, one of the 
disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us to pray, 
even as John also taught his disciples" (xi. i). 

" Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have 
you, that he might sift you as wheat ; but I made 
supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not" 
(xxii. 32). 



1 50 The Teaching of Jesus 

" And He kneeled down and prayed, saying, 
Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from 
Me : nevertheless not My will, but Thine be done. 
. , . And being in an agony He prayed more 
earnestly, and His sweat became as it were great 
drops of blood falling down upon the ground " 
(xxii. 41, 44). 

"And Jesus said. Father, forgive them; for 
they know not what they do " (xxiii. 34). 

And if thus Kj, the Redeemer, prayed, how 
much greater need have we, the redeemed, always 
to pray and not to faint ? 

" But we are so busy, we have no time." Then 
let us look at another picture. This time it is 
Mark who is the painter. He has chosen as his 
subject our Lord's first Sabbath in Capernaum. 
The day begins with teaching : " He entered into 
the synagogue and taught." After teaching comes 
healing : " There was in their synagogue a man 
with an unclean spirit;" him, straightway, Jesus 
healed. Then, " straightway, when they were 
come out of the synagogue, they came into the 
house of Simon and Andrew, with James and 
John. Now Simon's wife's mother lay sick of a 
fever, and straightway they tell Him of her ; and 
He came and took her by the hand, and raised 
her up." So the day wore on toward evening and 
sunset, when " they brought unto Him all that 
were sick, and them that were possessed with 
devils. And all the city was gathered together 
at the door. And He healed many that were sick 



Concerning Prayer 151 

with divers diseases and cast out many devils." 
So closed at last the long day's busy toil. " And 
in the morning, a great while before day, He rose 
up and went out and departed into a desert place, 
and there prayed ;^' as if just because He was so 
much with men the more did He need to be with 
God. Laborare est orare, we say, " work is prayer." 
And, undoubtedly, " work may be prayer " ; but we 
are deceiving ourselves and hurting our own souls, 
if we think that work can take the place of prayer. 
And if there is one lesson that these earthly years 
of the Son of Man — busy as they were prayerful, 
prayerful as they were busy — can teach us, it is 
surely this, that just because our activities are so 
abounding, the more need have we to make a 
space around the soul wherein it may be able to 
think, and pray, and aspire. 

One of the best- known pictures of the last 
half century is Millet's "Angelus." The scene is a 
potato-field, in the midst of which, and occupying 
the foreground of the picture, are two figures, a 
young man and a young woman. Against the 
distant sky-line is the steeple of a church. It is 
the evening hour, and as the bell rings which 
calls the villagers to worship, the workers in the 
field lay aside the implements of their toil, and 
with folded hands and bowed heads, stand for a 
moment in silent prayer. It is a picture of what 
every life should be, of what every life must be, which 
has taken as its pattern the Perfect Life in which 
work and prayer are blent like bells of sweet accord. 



152 The Teaching of Jesus 

II 

Another saying of Christ's concerning prayer, 
not less fundamental is this : " When ye pray, 
say, Our Father, which art in heaven." How 
essential to prayer is a right thought of God 
it can hardly be necessary to point out. " When 

ye pray say " what ? All depends on how 

we fill in the blank. Our thought of God deter- 
mines the character of all our intercourse with 
Him. If " God " is only the name which we give 
to the vast, unknown Power which lies behind the 
visible phenomena of the universe, if He is only 
a dim shadow projected by our own minds, or a 
collection of attributes whose names we have 
learned from the Catechism, our prayers will soon 
come to an end. When Jesus prayed He said 
always " Father " ; and the Father to whom He 
prayed, and whom He revealed, He it is to whom 
our prayers should be offered. 

This is a matter the practical importance of 
which it would be hard to exaggerate. Think, 
e.g.^ of the questions concerning prayer which 
would be answered straightway, had we but made 
our own Christ's thought of God. We are all 
familiar with the little problems about prayer wath 
which some good people are wont to tease them- 
selves and their friends and their ministers : Is it 
right to pray for rain, for fine weather, for the re- 
covery of health, for the success of some temporal 
enterprize, and so forth ? How shall we meet 



Concerning Prayer 153 

questions of this sort ? Shall we draw a line and 
say, all things on this side of the line we may 
pray about, all things on that side of the line we 
may not pray about ? This will not help us. 
Rather we must keep Christ's great word before 
us : " When ye pray, say, Father." There or 
nowhere is the answer to be found. Just as every 
wise father seeks to train his child to make of 
him his confidant, to have no secrets from him, to 
trust him utterly, and in everything, so would God 
have us feel towards Him ; as free, as frank, as 
unfettered, should our fellowship with Him be. 
To put it under constraint, to fence it about with 
rules, would be to rob it of all that gives it worth. 
And, therefore, I cannot tell any man, and I do 
not want any man to tell me, what we may pray 
for, or what we may not pray for. "When ye 
pray, say. Father ; " and for the rest let your own 
heart teach you. But if we are left thus free shall 
we not ask many things which we have no right 
to ask, which God cannot grant? Undoubtedly 
we shall, just as a boy of five will ask many things 
that his father, because he loves him, must refuse. 
Nevertheless, no wise father would wish to check 
the childish prattle. There is nothing that he 
values more than just these frank, uncalculating 
confidences, for he knows that it is by means of 
them that the shaping hands of love can do their 
perfect work. And the remedy for our mistakes 
in prayer is not a set of little man-made rules, 
telling us what to pray for and what not to pray 



154 ^-^^^ Teaching of Jestts 

for, but rather a deeper insight into, and a fuller 
understanding of, the glory and blessedness of the 
Divine Fatherhood. 

Ill 

Passing now from these preliminary counsels 
concerning prayer, let us note how great is the 
importance which, both by His precepts and His 
example, Christ attaches to the duty of inter- 
cessory prayer. I have been much struck of late 
in reading several books on this subject, to note 
how one writer after another judges it needful to 
warn his readers against the idea that prayer is no 
more than petition. What they say is, of course, 
true ; prayer is much more than petition. But, 
unless I misread the signs of the times, this is not 
the warning which just now we most need to hear. 
Rather do we need to be told that prayer is more 
than communion, that petition, simple asking that, 
we may obtain, is a part, and a very large part ol 
prayer. " Who rises from prayer a better man," 
says George Meredith, '' his prayer is answered." 
This is true, but it is far from being the whole 
truth. The duty of intercession, of prayer for 
others, is writ large on every page of the New 
Testament ; but intercession has simply no mean- 
ing at all unless we believe that God will grant 
our requests as may be most expedient for us and 
for them for whom we pray. Let me illustrate 
the wealth of Christ's teaching on this matter by 
two or three examples. 



Concei'fi ing Prayer 155 



(i) We have all read Tennyson's question — 

" What are men better than sheep or goats 
That nourish a blind life within the brain, 
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 
Both for themselves and those who call them friends ? " 

" For themselves and those who call them friends ' 
— but Christ will not suffer us to stop there. 
" Bless them that curse you," He said ; " pray for 
them that despitefully use you." So He spoke, 
and on the Cross He made the great word luminous 
for ever by His own prayer for His murderers : 
" Father, forgive them ; for they know not what 
they do." 

(2) Christ prayed for His disciples and for His 
Church : " I pray for them . . . neither for these 
only do I pray, but for them also that believe on 
Me through their word." " I will pray the Father 

and He shall give you ." Only once are the 

actual words recorded, but they cover, we are sure, 
great stretches of Christ's intercourse with God. 
And when once in their work for Him they had 
failed, He puts His finger on the secret of their 
failure thus : " This kind can come out by nothing- 
save by prayer." Do we pray for our Church ? 
We find fault with it ; but do we pray for it ? 
We blame its office - bearers and criticize its 
ministers ; but do we pray for them ? We go to 
the house of God on the Sabbath day ; but no 
fire is burning on the altar, the minister has no 
message for us, we come away no whit better than 
we went. Whose is the blame ? Let the man in 



156 The Teaching of J i 



esMS 



the pulpit take his share ; but is it all his ? Must 
not some of it be laid at the door of his people? 
How many of them during the week had prayed 
for him, that his eyes might be opened and his 
heart touched, that as he sat and worked in his 
study he might get from God to give to them ? 
Dr. Dale used to say that if ever he preached a 
good sermon, a sermon that really helped men, it 
was due to the prayers of his people as much as 
to anything he had done himself. If in all our 
churches we would but proclaim a truce to our 
bickerings and fault-findings, and try what prayer 
can do ! 

(3) Christ prayed for the children : " Then were 
there brought unto Him little children that He 
should lay His hands on them, and pray. . . , 
And He took them in His arms, and blessed them, 
laying His hands upon them." It is surely need- 
less to dwell on this. What man is there who, if 
he have a child, will not speak to God in his be- 
half? "And all the people said unto Samuel, 
Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God that 
we die not. . . . And Samuel said unto the 
people, God forbid that I should sin against the 
Lord in ceasing to pray for you." God have 
mercy on him who has little children who bear 
his name, but who never cries to heaven in their 
behalf 1 " He blessed them," i.e. He invoked a 
blessing, God's blessing, upon them. And we are 
sure the prayer was heard, and the little ones were 
blessed. And will not God hear our prayers for 



Concei^n ing Prayer 157 

our children ? When Monica, the saintly mother 
of Augustine, besought an African bishop once 
and again to help her with her wilful, profligate 
son, the good man answered her, " Woman, go in 
peace ; it cannot be that the child of such tears 
should be lost." " God's seed," wrote Samuel 
Rutherford to Marion M'Naught about her 
daughter Grizel, " shall come to God's harvest." It 
shall, for the promise holds, and what we have 
sown we shall also reap. 

(4) And, lastly, Christ prayed for individuals : 
" Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have 
you," — all of you," that is ; the pronoun is plural — 
" that he might sift you as wheat ; but I made 
supplication for thee " — " thee, Peter " ; now the 
singular pronoun is used — " that thy faith fail not." 
The words point to a definite crisis in the experi- 
ence of Peter, when the onset of the Tempter was 
met by the intercession of the Saviour. To me 
Gethsemane itself is not more wonderful than this 
picture of Christ on His knees before God, naming 
His loved disciple by name, and praying that, in 
this supreme hour of his life, his faith should not 
utterly break down. " Making mention of thee in 
my prayers" — does this not bring us near to the 
secret of prevailing prayer? We are afraid to be 
individual and particular ; we lose ourselves in large 
generalities, until our prayers die of very vagueness. 
There is surely a more excellent way. " My God," 
Paul wrote to the Philippians, "shall fulfil" — not 
merely " all your need," as the Authorized Version 



158 The Teaching of Jesus 

has it, but — " every need of yours." There is a 
fine discrimination in the Divine love which sifts 
and sorts men's needs, and applies itself to them 
one by one, just as the need may be. And when 
in prayer we speak to God, let it be not only of 
" all our need," flung in one great, careless heap 
before Him, but of " every need of ours," each one 
named by its name, and all spread out in order 
before Him. 

IV 

And as Christ teaches us to pray for others, 
so also does He teach us to pray for ourselves. 
Two points only in this connection can be noted. 

(i) Let us pray when we enter into our Geth- 
semane ; for every life has its Gethsemane. Some 
there are who have not yet entered it ; they are 
young, and their way thus far has been among the 
roses and lilies of life. But for them, too, the path 
leads to Gethsemane, and some day they also will 
lie prostrate in an agony, under the darkening 
olive trees. And some there are to whom life 
seems but one long Gethsemane. In that dread 
agony God help us to pray ! Nay, what else then 
can a man do but, as Browning says, catch at 
God's skirts and pray? But that he can do. 
Death may build its dividing walls great and 
high, such as our feet can never scale ; it cannot 
roof them over and shut us out from God. We 
remember how it was with Enoch Arden, stranded 
on an isle, " the loneliest in a lonely sea " : — 



Concerning Prayer 159 

" Had not his poor heart 
Spoken with That, which being everywhere 
Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone, 
Surely the man had died of solitude." 

Were it not for the doors opened in heaven what 
should man that is born of a woman do ? But 
when in our Gethsemane we offer up " prayers and 
supplications, with strong crying and tears," it is 
after Christ's manner that we must pray. I said 
just now that there are some to whom life seems 
one long Gethsemane. Can it be because hither- 
to they have only prayed, " O my Father, if it be 
possible, let this cup pass away from me " .-* Not 
until with Christ we bow our heads and say, 
" Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt," 
will the iron gates unfold and the shadows of the 
Garden lie behind us. 

(2) " Watch and pray, that ye enter not into 
temptation." And if there be some to whom my 
last word had little or no meaning, here, at least, 
Christ speaks to all. And this time I have nothing 
of my own to add by way of comment ; but I copy 
out this passage from Charles Kingsley's Yeast, for 
every young man who reads these words to lay to 
heart : " I am no saint," says Colonel Bracebridge, 
"and God only knows how much less of one I may 
become ; but mark my words — if you are ever 
tempted by passion, and vanity, and fine ladies, to 
form liaisons, as the Jezebels call them, snares, and 
nets and labyrinths of blind ditches, to keep you 
down through life, stumbling and grovelling, hating 



i6o The Teaching of Jesus 

yourself and hating the chain to which you cling— 
in that hour pray — pray as if the devil had you h\ 
the throat — to Almighty God, to help you out o 
that cursed slough ! There is nothing else for it V" 
pray, I tell you ! ' 



CONCERNING THE FORGIVENESS 
OF INJURIES 



l6l M 



" She, who kept a tender Christian hope, 
Haunting a holy text, and still to that 
Returning, as the bird returns, at night, 
* Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,' 
Said, 'Love, forgive him :' but he did not speak ; 
And silenced by that silence lay the wife, 
Remembering her dear Lord who died for all. 
And musing on the little lives of men. 
And how they mar this little by their feuds." 

Tennyson. 



162 



XI 

CONCERNING THE FORGIVENESS OF 
INJURIES 

'* Then came Peter ^ and said to Him, Lord, how oft shall my 
brother sin against me, and I forgive him? until seven times? 
Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, until seven times ; but, 
until seventy times seven.''^ — Matt, xviii. 21, 22. 

I^HIS would seem to be plain enough, even 
though we had nothing more from the 
lips of Jesus concerning the duty of forgiveness. 
In point of fact, however, the lesson of these 
words is repeated a full half-dozen times through- 
out the Gospels. It may be well, therefore, to 
begin by bringing together our Lord's sayings on 
the subject 

I 

We turn first to the Sermon on the Mount : 
"Ye have heard that it was said, Thoii shalt 
love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy ; but 
I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for 
them that persecute you." Then, in the Lord's 
Prayer we have the familiar petition, " Forgive 
us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass 

163 



1 64 The Teaching of Jesus 

against us." And it is surely a fact full of 
significance that at the close of the prayer our 
Lord should single out this one petition from 
the rest with this emphatic comment : " For if 
ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly 
Father will also forgive you. But if ye forgive 
not men their trespasses, neither will your Father 
forgive your trespasses." The words quoted thus 
far are taken from the first Gospel. Similar 
teaching is found in the second and third. Thus, 
in Mark, we read : " And whensoever ye stand 
praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any 
one ; that your Father also which is in heaven 
may forgive you your trespasses ; " and in Luke : 
" If thy brother sin, rebuke him, and if he repent, 
forgive him. And if he sin against thee seven 
times in the day, and seven times turn again to 
thee, saying, 1 repent ; thou shalt forgive him." 
Again, we have the teaching recorded by Matthew, 
out of which Peter's question sprang — " If thy 
brother sin against thee, go, show him his fault 
between thee and him alone ; if he hear thee, 
thou hast gained thy brother" — followed by the 
parable of the Unforgiving Servant, with its 
solemn warning of immitigable doom : " So shall 
also My heavenly Father do unto you, if ye for- 
give not every one his brother from your hearts." 
And, finally, all these words are made fast for 
ever in the minds and consciences of men, by 
the great act on the Cross when the dying 
Redeemer prayed for the men who slew Him : 



Concerning the Forgiveness of Injicries 165 

" Father, forgive them ; for they know not what 
they do." 

The meaning of all this is unmistakable. No 
child could miss the point of the solemn parable 
to which I have referred. At the same time, it 
may not be out of place to point out that there 
are not a few instances in which people may feel 
themselves wronged, which, nevertheless, do not 
come within the scope of Christ's teaching about 
forgiveness. An illustration will best explain my 
meaning. It sometimes happens, both in business 
life and in the Church, that two men, equally 
honourable and true, but with almost nothing else 
in common, are often thrown into each other's 
company. They have to deal with the same 
facts, but they look upon them with wholly 
different eyes, they approach them from wholly 
different points of view. The results are obvious. 
There are not only widely differing opinions, 
but occasional misunderstandings, and sometimes 
sharper words than ought ever to pass between 
Christian men. Now, to say broadly that one is 
right and the other wrong, that the one owes con- 
fession^ and the other forgiveness, is simply not 
true ; what is true is that the men are different, 
different in temperament, different in training, 
different in their whole habits of thought and life. 
And what is needed is that each should learn 
frankly to recognize the fact. This is not a case 
for rebuking, and repenting, and forgiving, but 
for mutual forbearance. There are multitudes 



1 66 The Teaching of Jesus 

of good people, people whose goodness no one 
who knows them would ever question, whom yet 
we cannot take to our bosoms, and treat as 
intimate personal friends. Even religion does 
not all at once straighten out all the twists 
in human nature, nor rub down all its hard 
angularities. And, as I say, it is our simple, 
common-sense duty to recognize the fact ; and if 
sometimes we find even our fellow - Christians 
" very trying," well, we must learn to bear and 
forbear, always remembering that others probably 
find us no less trying than we sometimes find 
them. But where grave and undeniable injury 
has been done, immediately Christ's teaching 
comes into operation. The injured one must 
banish all thought of revenge. Never must we 
say, '' I will do so to him as he hath done to 
me ; I will render to the man according to his 
work." Rather must we strive to overcome evil 
by good, and by the manifestation of a forgiving 
spirit to win the wrong-doer to repentance and 
amendment. 

II 

When, now, we take these precepts of Jesus 
and lay them side by side with the life of the 
world, or even with the life of the Church, as 
day by day it passes before our eyes, our first 
thought must be, how little yet do men heed the 
words of Jesus, how much mightier is the pagan 
spirit of revenge than the Christian spirit of for- 



Concerning the Forgiveness of Injuries 167 

giveness. Indeed, of all the virtues which Christ 
inculcated, this, perhaps, is the most difficult. True 
forgiveness — I do not speak of the poor, bloodless 
phantom which sometimes passes by the name : 

" Forgive ! How many will say ' forgive,' and find 
A sort of absolution in the sound 
To hate a little longer," 

—not of such do I speak, but of true forgiveness, 
and this, I say, can never for us men be an easy 
thing. Perhaps a frank consideration of some of 
the difficulties may contribute to their removal. 

(i) One chief reason why Christ's command 
remains so largely a dead letter is to be found in 
our unwillingness to acknowledge that we have 
committed an injury. That another should have 
wronged us we find no difficulty in believing ; 
that we have wronged another is very hard to 
believe. Look at the very form of Peter's 
question : " How oft shall my brother sin against 
me, and I forgive him ? " " My brother " the 
wrong-doer, myself the wronged — that is what 
we are all ready to assume. But what if it is I 
who have need to be forgiven ? But this is what 
our pride will not suffer us to believe. That 
" bold villain " Shame, who plucked Faithful by 
the elbow in the Valley of Humiliation, and sought 
to persuade him that it is a shame to ask one's 
neighbour forgiveness for petty faults, or to make 
restitution where we have taken from any, is 
always quick to seize his opportunity. And he is 



1 68 TJie Teaching of Jesus 

especially quick when acknowledgment is due to 
one who is socially our inferior. If an employe 
be guilty of some gross discourtesy towards his 
master, or a servant towards her mistress, the 
master or mistress may demand a prompt apology 
on pain of instant dismissal. But when it is the 
servant or employe who is the injured person he 
has no such remedy ; yet surely, in Christ's ^y^?,, 
his very dependence makes the duty of confession 
doubly imperative. "If," Christ said, "thou, art 
offering thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest 
that thy brother hath aught against thee " — note 
exactly Christ's words ; He did not say, " If thou 
rememberest that thou hast aught against thy 
brother " ; alas, it is very easy for most of us to 
do that ; what He said was, " If thou rememberest 
that thy brother hath aught against thee," Whom 
did I overreach in business yesterday ? Whose 
good name did I drag through the mire? What 
heart did I stab with my cruel words ? " If thou 
rememberest that thy brother hath aught against 
thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go 
thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother, and 
then come and offer thy gift." 

(2) If the difficulties are great when we have 
committed the wrong, they are hardly less when 
we have suffered it. Thomas Fuller tells how once 
he saw a mother threatening to beat her little 
child for not rightly pronouncing the petition in 
the Lord's Prayer, " Forgive us our trespasses, as 
we forgive them that trespass against us." The 



Concerning the Forgiveness of InjwHes 169 

child tried its best, but could get no nearer than 
" tepasses," and " trepasses." " Alas ! " says Fuller, 
it is a shibboleth to a child's tongue wherein 
there is a confluence of hard consonants together ; " 
and then he continues, " What the child could not 
pronounce the parents do not practise. O how 
lispingly and imperfectly do we perform the close 
of this petition : As we forgive them that trespass 
against us." In the old Greek and Roman world, 
we have been told, people -not only did not forgive 
their enemies, but did not wish to do so, nor think 
better of themselves for having done so. That 
man considered himself fortunate who, on his 
death-bed, could say, on reviewing his past life, 
that no one had done more good to his friends or 
more mischief to his enemies. And though we 
profess and call ourselves Christians, how strong 
in many of us still is the old heathen desire to be 
" even with " one who has wronged us, and to 
make him smart for it. Many of us, as Dr. Dale 
says,^ have given a new turn to an old text. In 
our own private Revised Version of the New 
Testament we read : " Whosoever speaketh a word 
or committeth a wrong against God, it shall be 
forgiven him ; but whosoever speaketh a word or 
committeth a wrong against me, it shall not be 
forgiven him ; certainly not in this world, even if 
it is forgiven in the world to come." Resentment 
against moral evil every good man must feel ; but 
when with the clear, bright flame of a holy wrath 
1 Laws of Christ for Comtnon Life, p. 59. 



1 70 The Teaching of Jestts 

there mingle the dark fumes of personal vindictive- 
ness, we do wrong, we sin against God. 

Nowhere in Scripture, perhaps, have we such a 
lesson on the difficulty of forgiveness as in the 
reference to Alexander the coppersmith, in St. 
Paul's last letter to Timothy. Even if we read 
his words in the modified and undoubtedly accurate 
form in which they are found in the Revised 
Version, we still feel how far short they come of 
the standard of Christ. " Paul," says Dr. Whyte, 
" was put by Alexander to the last trial and 
sorest temptation of an apostolic and a sanctified 
heart." ^ And with all the greatness of our regard 
for the great apostle, we dare not say that he came 
out of the trial wholly unscathed. Did ever any 
man come out of such a fire unhurt — any save 
One ? Yet it is not for me to sit in judgment on 
St. Paul ; only let us remember we have no 
warrant from God to hate any man and to hand 
him over to eternal judgment even though, like 
Alexander, he heap insult and injury, not only upon 
ourselves, but upon the cause and Church of Christ. 

(3) And then to this native, inborn unwilling- 
ness to forgive there comes in to strengthen it 
our knowledge of the fact that forgiveness is some- 
times mistaken for, and does, in fact, sometimes 
degenerate into, the moral weakness which slurs 
over a fault, and refuses to strike only because it 
dare not. Nevertheless, though there be counter- 
feits current, there is a reality ; there is a forgiving 

1 Bible Characters : Stephen to Timothy ^ p. 95. 



Concerning the Forgiveness of Injuries 1 7 1 

spirit which has no kinship with cowardice or 
weakness or mere mushiness of character, but 
which is the offspring of strength and goodness 
and mercy, in short, of all in man that is likest 
God. And it is this not that which God bids us 
make our own ; and not the less so becaus'e in the 
rough ways of the world that so often passes for 
this. 

Ill 

It would be easy to go on enumerating diffi- 
culties, but long as the enumeration might be, 
Christ's command would still remain in all its 
explicitness, the Divine obligation would be in no 
way weakened. We must forgive ; we must 
forgive from our hearts ; and there must be no 
limit to our forgiveness. Nor is this all. The 
whole law of forgiveness is not fulfilled when one 
who has done us an injury has come humbly 
making confession, and we have accepted the con- 
fession and agreed to let bygones be bygones. 
We should be heartless wretches indeed, if, under 
such circumstances, we were not willing to do as 
much as that. But we must do more : " If thy 
brother sin against thee, go, show him his fault 
between thee and him alone ; if he hear thee, 
thou hast gained thy brother." We, we who have 
been wronged, must take the first step. We must 
not wait for the wrong-doer to come to us ; we 
must go to him. We must lay aside our vin- 
dictiveness, and earnestly, patiently, making our 



172 The Teaching of Jesus 

appeal to his better self, by every art and device 
which love can suggest, we must help him to take 
sides against the wrong which he has done, 
until at last forgiving love has led him captive, 
and our brother is won. This is the teaching of 
Jesus. Let me suggest, in conclusion, a three-fold 
reason why we should give heed to it. 

Let us forgive for our own sake. A man of an 
unforgiving spirit is always his own worst enemy. 
He " that studieth revenge," says Bacon, " keeps 
his own wounds green, which otherwise would 
heal and do well." " If thou hast not mercy for 
others," says Sir Thomas Browne, "yet be not 
cruel unto thyself; to ruminate upon evils, to 
make critical notes upon injuries, is to add unto 
our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our 
enemies." There is no misery worse than that of 
a mind which broods continually over its own 
wrongs, be they real or only fancied. There is no 
gloom so deep and dark as that which settles on 
a hard and unrelenting soul. And, on the other 
hand, there is no joy so pure, there is none so 
rewarding, as that of one who, from his heart, has 
learned to say, " I forgive." He has tasted the 
very joy of God, the joy of Him of whom it is 
written that He delighteth in mercy. Just as 
when a sea-worm perforates the shell of an oyster, 
the oyster straightway closes the wound with a 
pearl, so does a forgiving spirit heal the hidden 
hurt of the heart, and win for itself a boon even at 
the hands of its foe. 



Concei^ning the Forgiveness of Inju^Hes 173 

Let us forgive for our brotJiers sake. " What," 
asks George MacDonald, " am I brother for, but to 
forgive ? " And how much for my brother my 
forgiv^eness may do ! All love, not Christ's love 
only, has within it a strange redemptive power. 
We often profess ourselves puzzled by that hard 
saying of Jesus concerning the binding and loosing 
of men's sins. Yet this is just what human love, 
or the want of it, is doing every day. When we 
forgive men their sins, we so far loose them from 
them ; we help them to believe in the power and 
reality of the Divine forgiveness. When we refuse 
to forgive, we bind their sins to them, we make 
them doubt the love and mercy of God. Have 
we forgotten the part which Ananias played in 
the conversion of Saul of Tarsus ? St. Augustine 
used to say that the Church owed Paul to the 
prayers of Stephen. Might he not have said, with 
equal truth, that the Church owed Paul to the 
forgiveness of Ananias ? For three days, without 
sight, and without food or drink, Saul waited in 
Damascus, pondering the meaning of the heavenly 
vision. Then came unto him, sent by God, the 
man whose life he had 'meant to take : " Ananias 
entered into the house ; and, laying his hands on 
him, said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, who 
appeared unto thee in the way which thou camest, 
hath sent me." ^^ Brother Saul" — how his heart must 
have leapt within him at the sound of the word ! 
It was a voice from without confirming the voice 
within ; it was the love and forgiveness of man 



1 74 The Teaching of Jesus 

sealing and making sure the love and forgiveness 
of God. Wherefore, let us take heed lest, by our 
sullen refusal to forgive, we be thrusting some 
penitent soul back into the miry depths, whence, 
slowly and painfully, it is winning its way into the 
light and love of God. 

Let us forgive for Christ's sake, because of that 
which God through Him has done for us. When, 
day by day, we pray, " Forgive us our trespasses 
as we forgive them that trespass against us," what 
we are asking is, that God will deal with us as we 
are dealing with others. Do we mean what we 
say ? Are we showing a mercy as large as we need? 
Chrysostom tells us that many people in his day 
used to omit the words, " As we forgive them that 
trespass against us." They did not dare to ask 
God to deal with their sins as they were dealing 
with the sins of those who had wronged them, 
lest they brought upon themselves not a blessing 
but a curse. And would it not go hardly with 
some of us, if, with the measure we mete, God 
should measure to us again ? Yet there is no 
mistaking Christ's words : " If ye forgive not men 
their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive 
your trespasses." Therefore, let me think of myself, 
of my own sin, of the forgiveness even unto 
seventy times seven which I need ; and then let 
me ask, can I, whose need is so great, dole out 
my forgiveness with a grudging hand, counting 
till a poor " seven times " be reached, and then 
staying my hand ? Rather, let me pray, Lord, 



Concerning the Foi'giveness of Injuries 175 

" Make my forgiveness downright — such as I 
Should perish if I did not have from Thee." 

" Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and 
clamour, and railing, be put away from you, with 
all malice ; and be ye kind one to another, tender- 
hearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in 
Christ forgave you." 

" O man, forgive thy mortal foe, 
Nor ever strike him blow for blow ; 
For all the souls on earth that live 
To be forgiven must forgive, 
Forgive him seventy times and seven : 
For all the blessed souls in Heaven 
Are both forgivers and forgiven." 



CONCERNING CARE 



177 , N 



** My spirit on Thy care. 

Blest Saviour, I recline ; 
Thou wilt not leave me in despair, 

For Thou art Love Divine. 

In Thee I place my trust, 
On Thee I calmly rest ; 
I know Thee good, I know Thee just. 
And count Thy choice the best. 

Whate'er events betide, 
Thy will they all perform ; 
Safe in Thy breast my head I hide, 
Nor fear the coming storm. 

Let good or ill befall. 
It must be good for me. 
Secure of having Thee in all. 
Of having all in Thee." 

H. F. Lyte. 



178 



XII 



CONCERNING CARE 

^^ Be not anxious for your life . . . nor yet for your body. . . , 
Be not anxious^ sayings What shall we eat ? or, What shall we 
drink 1 , , , Be not anxious for the morrozv." — Matt. vi. 25, 
31. 34. 

I 

" 'T^ AKE no thought for your life " is the more 
familiar rendering of the Authorized Ver- 
sion. And if the words conveyed the same 
meaning to us to-day as they did to all English- 
speaking people in the year 161 1, there would 
have been no need for a change. A great student 
of words, the late Archbishop Trench, tells us 
that " thought " was then constantly used as 
equivalent to anxiety or solicitous care ; and he 
gives three illustrations of this use of the word 
from writers of the Elizabethan age. Thus Bacon 
writes : " Harris, an alderman in London, was put 
in trouble, and died with thought and anxiety 
before his business came to an end." Again, in one 
of the Somer's Tracts, we read, " Queen Katharine 
Parr died of thought " ; and in Shakespeare's 
fulius Ccesar, " Take thought and die for Caesar," 

179 



1 80 The Teaching of Jesus 

where " to take thought " is to take a matter so 
seriously to heart that death ensues.^ In 161 1, 
therefore, the old translation did accurately re- 
produce Christ's thought. To-day, however, it is 
altogether inadequate, and sometimes, it is to be 
feared, positively misleading. For neither in this 
chapter nor anywhere in Christ's teaching is there 
one word against what we call forethought, and 
they who would find in the words of Jesus any 
encouragement to thriftlessness are but misrepre- 
senting Him and deceiving themselves. Every 
man, who is not either a rogue or a fool, must take 
thought for the morrow ; at least, if he does not, 
some one must for him, or the morrow will avenge 
itself upon him without mercy. What our Lord 
forbids is not prudent foresight, but worry : " Be 
ye not anxious!' The word which Christ uses 
{fiepLfjLvaTe) is a very suggestive one ; it describes 
the state of mind of one who is drawn in different 
directions, torn by internal conflict, " distracted," 
as we say, where precisely the same figure of 
speech occurs, A similar counsel is to be found 
in another and still more striking word which only 
Luke has recorded, and which is rendered, " Neither 
be ye of doubtful mind." There is a picture in 
the word (/jLerecopl^eo-de), the picture of a vessel 
vexed by contrary winds, now uplifted on the 
crest of some huge wave, now labouring in the 
trough of the sea. " Be ye not thus," Christ says 
to His disciples, " the sport of your cares, driven 

1 On the Authorized Version of the New Testajfienf, p. 14. 



Concerning Care i8i 

by the wind and tossed ; but let the peace of God 
rule in your hearts, and be ye not of doubtful 
mind." 

It cannot surprise us that Jesus should speak 
thus; rather should we have been surprised if it 
had been otherwise. How could He speak to 
men at all and yet be silent about their cares ? 
For how full of care the lives of most men are ! 
One is anxious about his health, and another about 
his business ; one is concerned because for weeks 
he has been without work, and another because 
his investments are turning out badly ; some are 
troubled about their children, and some there are 
who are making a care even of their religion, and 
instead of letting it carry them are trying to carry 
it ; until, with burdens of one kind or another, we 
are like a string of Swiss pack-horses, such as one 
may sometimes see, toiling and straining up some 
steep Alpine pass under a blazing July sun. Poor 
Martha, with her sad, tired face, and nervous, 
fretful ways, " anxious and troubled about many 
things," is everywhere to-day. Nor is it the poor 
only whose lives are full of care. It was not a 
poor man amid his poverty, but a rich man amid 
his riches, who, in Christ's parable, put to himself 
the question, "What shall I do?" The birds of 
care build their nests amid the turrets of a palace 
as readily as in the thatched roof of a cottage. 
The cruel thorns — " the cares of this life," as Jesus 
calls them — which choke the good seed, sometimes 
spring up more easily within the carefully fenced 



1 82 The Teaching of Jesus 

enclosure of my lord's park than in the little 
garden plot of the keeper of his lodge. On the 
whole, perhaps, and in proportion to their number, 
there is less harassing, wearing anxiety in the 
homes of the poor than in those of the wealthy. 
And what harsh taskmasters our cares can be ! 
How they will lord it over us ! Give them the 
saddle and the reins, and they will ride us to 
death. Seat them on the throne, and they will 
chastise us not only with whips but with scorpions. 
It is no wonder that Christ should set Himself to 
free men from this grinding tyranny. He is no 
true deliverer for us who cannot break the cruel 
bondage of our cares. 

II 

Let us listen, then, to Christ's gracious 
argument and wise remonstrances. What, He 
asks, is the good of our anxiety? What can it 
do for us? "Which of you by being anxious can 
add one cubit unto his stature ? If, then, ye are 
not able to do that which is least, why are ye 
anxious concerning the rest ? " " But, the morrow ! 
the morrow ! " we cry. " Let the morrow," Christ 
answers, " take care of itself ; sufficient unto the 
day is the evil thereof; learn thou to live a day 
at a time." " Our earliest duty," says a great 
writer of our day, " is to cultivate the habit of not 
looking round the corner ; " which is but another 
version of Christ's simple precept. And the say- 
ing, simple and obvious as it may seem, never fails 



Concerning Care 183 

to justify itself. For one thing, the morrow rarely 
turns out as our fears imagined it. Our very 
anxiety blurs our vision, and throws our judgment 
out of focus. We see things through an atmo- 
sphere which both magnifies and distorts. We 
remember how it was with Mr. Fearing : " When 
he was come to the entrance of the Valley of the 
Shadow of Death, I thought " — it is Greatheart 
who tells the story — " I should have lost my man : 
not for that he had any inclination to go back, — 
that he always abhorred ; but he was ready to die 
for fear. Oh, the hobgoblins will have me ! the 
hobgoblins will have me ! cried he ; and I could 
not beat him out on't." Yet see how matters fell 
out " This I took very great notice of," goes on 
Greatheart, " that this valley was as quiet while he 
went through it as ever I knew it before or since." 
And again, when Mr. Fearing " was come at the 
river where was no bridge, there again he was in 
a heavy case. Now, now, he said, he should be 
drowned for ever, and so never see that face with 
comfort, that he had come so many miles to 
behold." But once more his fears were put to 
shame : " Here, also, I took notice of what was 
very remarkable : the water of that river was 
lower at this time than ever I saw it in all my 
life. So he went over at last, not much above 
wet-shod." 

And even though the morrow should prove as 
bad as our fears, Christ's precept is still justified, 
for the worst kind of preparation for such a 



184 The Teaching of Jesus 

day is worry. Worry, like the undue clatter of 
machinery, means waste, waste of power. Anxiety, 
it has been well said, does not empty to-morrow 
of its sorrows, but it does empty to-day of its 
strength. Therefore, let us not be anxious. Let 
us climb our hills when we come to them. God 
gives each day strength for the day ; but when, 
to the responsibilities of to-day we add the 
burdens of to-morrow, and try to do the work of 
two days in the strength of one, we are making 
straight paths for the feet of failure and dis- 
appointment. All the many voices of reason and 
experience are on Christ's side when He bids us, 
'* Be not anxious." 

Yet, true as all this is, how inadequate it is ! 
When the tides of care are at the flood they will 
overrun and submerge all such counsels as these, 
as the waves wash away the little sand-hills which 
children build by the sea-shore. "We know it is 
no good to worry," people will tell us, half- 
petulantly, when we remonstrate with them ; 
*' but we cannot help ourselves, and if you have 
no more to say to us than this, you cannot help 
us either." And they are right. Care is the 
cancer of the heart, and if our words can go no 
deeper than they have yet gone, it can never be 
cured. It is an inward spiritual derangement, 
which calls for something more than little bits of 
good advice in order to put it right. And if, 
again, we turn to the words of Jesus, we shall 
find the needed something more is given. The 



Concernmg Care 



careworn soul, for its cure, must be taken out of 
itself. " Oh the bliss of waking," says some one, 
" with all one's thoughts turned outward ! " It is 
the power to do that, to turn, and to keep turned, 
one's thoughts outwards that the care-ridden need; 
and Christ will show us how it may be ours. 

''Be not anxious," says Jesus; and then side 
by side with this negative precept He lays this 
positive one : " Seek ye first the kingdom of 
God." Christ came to establish a kingdom in 
which " all men's good " should be " each man's 
rule," and love the universal law. When, there- 
fore, He bids the anxious seek the kingdom, what 
He means is that they are to find an escape from 
self and self-consuming cares in service. " When 
you find yourself overpowered by melancholy," 
said John Keble, " the best way is to go out and 
do something kind to somebody or other." And 
thousands who are sitting daily in the gloom of 
a self-created misery, with all the blinds of the 
spirit drawn, if they would but " go out " and 
begin to care for others, would speedily cease 
their miserable care for themselves. " When I 
dig a man out of trouble," some one quaintly 
writes, " the hole he leaves behind him is the 
grave in which I bury my own trouble." ^ This is 
not the whole cure for care ; but if the mind is to 
be kept from burrowing in the dark of its own 
fears and anxieties, it must be set resolutely and 

^ I am indebted for these two quotations to Bishop Paget's 
Spirit of Disciplme^ p. 66. 



1 86 The Teaching of J e SMS 

constantly on those nobler ends to which Christ 
in His gospel summons us all, 

The care-worn, Christ says, must think of 
others ; and, most of all, they must think of God. 
" Let not your heart be troubled ... believe." 
This is the great argument into which all other 
arguments run up. This is the larger truth, 
within whose wide circumference lie all Christ's 
words concerning care. We are not to care 
because we are cared for, cared for by God. 
There is, Christ teaches us, a distribution of duties 
between ourselves and God. We, on our part, 
make it our daily business to get God's will done 
on earth as it is done in heaven ; He, on His, 
undertakes that we shall not want. 

" Make you His service your delight, 
He'll make your wants His care." 

Once more we see how fundamental is Christ's 
doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood. It is not so 
much because our anxiety is useless, or because 
it unfits us for service, but because God is what 
He is, that our worry is at once a blunder and 
a sin. It is mistrust of the heavenly love that 
cares for us. The sovereign cure for care is — ^ 
God. 

Ill 

But now a difficulty arises. Christ's doctrine 
of the Divine Fatherhood is, without doubt, 
fundamental ; but is it true ? A God who 



Concerning Care 187 

clothes the blowing lilies with their silent beauty, 
without whom no sparrow falleth to the ground, 
who nunnbers the very hairs of our head — it is 
a glorious faith, if one could but receive it. But 
can we? It was possible once, we think, in the 
childhood of the world ; but that time has gone, 
and we are the children of a new day, whose 
thoughts we cannot choose but think. So long 
as men thought of our earth as the centre of the 
universe, it was not difficult to believe that its 
inhabitants were the peculiar care of their Creator. 
But astronomy has changed all that ; and what 
once we thought so great, we know now to be but 
a speck amid infinite systems of worlds. The 
old question challenges us with a force the 
Psalmist could not feel : " When I consider Thy 
heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and 
the stars which Thou hast ordained ; what is man 
that Thou are mindful of him ? and the son of 
man that Thou visitest him.?" The infinity of 
God, the nothingness of man : the poor brain 
reels before the contrast. Is it thinkable, we ask, 
that He whose dwelling-place is eternity should 
care for us even as we care for our children ? So 
the question is often urged upon us to-day. But 
arguments of this kind, it has been well said, are 
simply an attempt to terrorize the imagination, 
and are not to be yielded to. As a recent writer 
admirably says : *' We know little or nothing of 
the rest of the universe, and it may very well 
be that in no other planet but this is there 



1 88 The Teaching of Jesus 

intelligent and moral life ; and, if that be so, then 
this world, despite its material insignificance, 
would remain the real summit of creation. But 
even if this be not so, still man remains man — a 
spiritual being, capable of knowing, loving, and 
glorifying God. Man is that, be there what 
myriads of worlds there may, and is not less 
than that, though in other worlds were also 
beings like him. . . . No conception of God is 
less imposing than that which represents Him as 
a kind of millionaire in worlds, so materialized by 
the immensity of His possessions as to have lost 
the sense of the incalculably greater worth of 
the spiritual interests of even the smallest part of 
them."i 

But this is not the only difficulty ; for some 
it is not the chief difficulty. We have no 
theories of God and the universe which bar the 
possibility of His intervention in the little lives 
of men. There is nothing incredible to us in 
the doctrine of a particular Providence. But 
where, we ask, is the proof of it } We would 
fain believe, but the facts of experience seem too 
strong for us. A hundred thousand Armenians 
butchered at the will of an inhuman despot, a 
whole city buried under a volcano's fiery hail, 
countless multitudes suffering the slow torture 
of death by famine — can such things be and 
God really care? Nor is it only great world 
tragedies like these which challenge our faith. 

* P. Carnegie Simpson, The Fact of Christy pp. Ii6, 1 17, 



Concerning Care 189 

The question is pressed upon us, often with 
sickening keenness, by the commonplace ills of 
our own commonplace lives : the cruel wrong 
of another's sin, the long, wasting pain, the 
empty cradle, the broken heart. How can we 
look on these things and yet believe that Eternal 
Love is on the throne ? 

Except we believe in Jesus we cannot ; if we 
do, we must. For remember, Jesus was no 
shallow optimist ; He did not go through life 
seeing only its pleasant things ; He was at Cana 
of Galilee, but He was also at Nain ; over all 
His life there lay a shadow, the shadow of the 
Cross ; He died in the dark, betrayed of man, 
forsaken of God ; surely He hath borne our 
griefs and carried our sorrows. And yet through 
all. His faith in God never wavered. He prayed, 
and He taught others to pray. When He lifted 
His eyes towards heaven, it was with the word 
" Father " upon His lips ; and in like manner He 
bade His disciples, " When ye pray, say * Father.' " 
He took the trembling hands of men within His 
own, and looking into their eyes, filled as they 
were with a thousand nameless fears, " Fear not," 
He said, " your heavenly Father knoweth ; let 
not your heart be troubled, neither let it be 
afraid." 

" Learn of Me . . . and ye shall find rest 
unto your souls ; " herein is the secret of peace. 
But it is not enough that we give ear to the 
words of Christ ; we must make our own the 



1 90 The Teaching of Jesus 

whole meaning of the fact of Christ. " God's in 
His heaven," sings Browning ; " all's right with 
the world." But if God is only in His heaven, 
all is not right with the world. In Christ we 
learn that God has come from out His heaven 
to earth ; and in the Cross of Christ we find the 
eternal love which meets and answers all our 
fears. Fear not, 

" Or if you fear, 
Cast all your cares on God ; that anchor holds." 

" Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it 
be afraid." 



CONCERNING MONEY 



191 



"Now I saw in my dream, that at the further side of that 
plain was a little hill called Lucre, and in that hill a silver-mine, 
which some of them that had formerly gone that way, because of 
the rarity of it, had turned aside to see ; but going too near the 
brink of the pit, the ground being deceitful under them, broke, and 
they were slain ; some also had been maimed there, and could not 
to their dying day be their own men again." — John Bunyan, 



IQ2 



XIII 
CONCERNING MONEY 

'* Hoto hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom 
of God I For it is easier for a camel to enter in through a needless 
eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God J** — 
Luke xviii. 24, 25. 

I 

THE most significant thing in the teaching 
of Jesus concerning money is the large 
place which it fills in the records of our Lord's 
public ministry. How large that place is few of 
us, perhaps, realize. Even religious writers who 
take in hand to set forth Christ's teaching in 
detail, for the most part, pass over this subject in 
silence. In Hastings' great Dictionary of the Bible 
we find, under " Money," a most elaborate article, 
extending to nearly twenty pages, and discussing 
with great fulness and learning the coinage of 
various Biblical periods ; but when we seek to 
know what the New Testament has to say con- 
cerning the use and perils of wealth, the whole 
subject is dismissed in some nine lines. 

Very different is the impression which we 
receive from the Gospels themselves. It is not 
193 O 



194 1^^^ Teaching of Jesus 

possible here to bring together all Christ's words 
about money, but we may take the third Gospel 
(in which the references to the subject are most 
numerous) and note Christ's more striking sayings 
in the order in which they occur. In the parable 
of the sower, in the eighth chapter, the thorns 
which choke the good seed are the "cares and 
riches and pleasures of this life." Chapter twelve 
contains a warning against covetousness, enforced 
by the parable of the rich fool and its sharp- 
pointed application, " So is he that layeth up 
treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God." 
The fourteenth chapter sheds a new light on the law 
of hospitality : " When thou makest a dinner or a 
supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, nor 
thy kinsmen, nor rich neighbours . . . but when 
thou makest a feast, bid the poor, the maimed, 
the lame, the blind ; and thou shalt be blessed." 
Chapter fifteen tells how a certain son wasted his 
substance with riotous living. Chapter sixteen 
opens with the parable of the unjust steward ; 
then follow weighty words touching the right use 
of " the mammon of unrighteousness." But the 
Pharisees, who were lovers of money, v/hen they 
heard these things, " scoffed at Him." Christ's 
answer is the parable of Dives and Lazarus, with 
which the chapter closes. Chapter eighteen tells 
of a rich young ruler's choice, and of Christ's 
sorrowful comment thereon : " How hardly shall 
they that have riches enter into the kingdom of 
God." And then, lastly, in the nineteenth chapter. 



Concerning Money 195 

we hear Zacchaeus, into whose home and heart 
Christ had entered, resolving on the threshold of 
his new life that henceforth the half of his goods 
he would give to the poor, and that where he had 
wrongfully exacted aught of any man he would 
restore four-fold. It is indeed a remarkable fact, 
the full significance of which few Christians have 
yet realized, that, as John Ruskin says, the subject 
which we might have expected a Divine Teacher 
would have been content to leave to others is the 
very one He singles out on which to speak parables 
for all men's memory.^ 

II 

The question is sometimes asked how the 
teaching of Jesus concerning money is related to 
that strange product of civilization, the modern 
millionaire. The present writer, at least, cannot 
hold with those who think that Christ was a com- 
munist, or that He regarded the possession of wealth 
as in itself a sin. Nevertheless, it is impossible 
not to sympathize with the feeling that the accumu- 
lation of huge fortunes in the hands of individuals 
is not according to the will of Christ. Mr. Andrew 
Carnegie is reported to have said that a man 
who dies a millionaire dies disgraced ; and few 
persons who take their New Testament seriously 
will be disposed to contradict him. But, inas- 
much as all millionaires are not prepared like Mr. 

* Timi and Tide, p. 224. 



196 The Teaching of Jesus 

Carnegie to save themselves from disgrace, the 
question is beginning to arise in the minds of 
many, v^hether society itself should not come to 
the rescue — its own and the rich man's. No 
man, it may be pretty confidently affirmed, can 
possibly earn a million ; he may obtain it, he 
may obtain it by methods which are not techni- 
cally unjust, but he has not earned it. Be a 
man's powers what they may, it is impossible that 
his share of the wealth which he has helped to 
create can be fairly represented by a sum so vast. 
If he receives it, others may reasonably complain 
that there is something wrong in the principle of 
distribution. And unless, both by a larger justice 
to his employes, and by generous benefactions to 
the public, he do something to correct the defects 
in his title, he must not be surprised if some who 
feel themselves disinherited are driven to ask 
ominous and inconvenient questions. 

This, however, is a matter which it is impossible 
now to discuss further. Turning again to Christ's 
sayings about money, we may summarize them in 
this fashion : Christ says nothing about the making 
of money, He says much about the use of it, and 
still more about its perils and the need there is 
for a revised estimate of its worth. Following 
the example of Christ, it is the last point of which 
I wish more especially to speak. But before 
coming to that, it may be well briefly to recall 
some of the things which Christ has said touching 
the use of wealth. Wealth, He declares, is a trust; 



Concerning Money 197 

for our use of which we must give account unto 
God. In our relation to others we may be pro- 
prietors ; before God there are no proprietors, but 
all are stewards. And in the Gospels there are 
indicated some of the ways in which our steward- 
ship may be fulfilled. I will mention two of them. 

(1) "When thou doest alms" — -Christ, you 
will observe, took for granted that His disciples 
would give alms, as He took for granted that they 
would pray. He prescribes no form which our 
charity must take ; we have to exercise our judg- 
ment in this, as in other matters. Obedience is 
left the largest liberty, but not the liberty of dis- 
obedience ; and they who open their ears greedily 
to take in all that the political economist and 
others tell us of the evils of indiscriminate charity, 
only that they may the more tightly button up 
their pockets against the claims of the needy, are 
plainly disregarding the will of Christ. If what 
we are told is true, the more binding is the 
obligation to discover some other way in which 
our alms-giving may become more effective. The 
duty itself no man can escape who calls Christ 
Jesus Lord and Master. 

(2) But wealth, Christ tells us, may minister 
not merely to the physical necessities, but to the 
beauty and happiness of life. When Christ was 
invited to the marriage-feast at Cana of Galilee, 
when Matthew the publican made for Him a feast 
in His |)wn house, He did not churlishly refuse, 
saying that such expenditure was wasteful and 



198 The Teaching of Jesus 

wicked excess. When in the house of Simon the 
leper Mary "took a pound of ointment of spike- 
nard, very precious, and anointed the feet of Jesus," 
and they that sat by murmured, saying, " To what 
purpose is this waste ? for this ointment might 
have been sold for above three hundred pence 
and given to the poor," Jesus threw His shield 
about this woman and her deed of love : " Let 
her alone ; why trouble ye her ? She hath wrought 
a good work on Me." These words, it has been 
well said, are " the charter of all undertakings 
which propose, in the name of Christ, to feed the 
mind, to stir the imagination, to quicken the 
emotions, to make life less meagre, less animal, 
less dull." ^ Do not let us speak as though the 
only friends of the poor were those who gave them 
oatmeal at Christmas, or who secure for them 
alms-houses in their old age. There is a life 
which is more than meat, and all heavenly charity 
is not to be bound up in bags of flour. He who 
strives to bring into the grey, monotonous lives 
of the toilers of our great cities the sweet, refining 
influences of art, and music and literature, he who 
helps his fellows to see and to love the true and 
the beautiful and the good, is not one whit less 
a benefactor of his kind than he who obtains for 
them better food and better homes. Man shall not 
live by bread alone, and they who use their wealth 
to minister to a higher life serve us not less really 
than they who provide for our physical needs. 
^ F. G. Peabody, y^jwj Christ and the Social Problem ^ p. 219. 



Concerning Money 199 



III 

Much, however, as Christ has to say con- 
cerning the noble uses to which wealth may 
be put, it is not here, as every reader of the 
Gospels must feel, that the full emphasis of His 
words comes. It is when He goes on to speak 
of the perils of -the rich, and of our wrong estimates 
of the worth of wealth, that His solemn warnings 
pierce to the quick. Christ did not live, nor does 
He call us to live, in an unreal world, though 
perhaps there are few subjects concerning which 
more unreal words have been spoken than this. 
The power of wealth is great, the power of con- 
secrated wealth is incalculably great ; and this the 
New Testament freely recognizes ; but wealth is 
not the great, necessary, all-sufficing thing that 
ninety-nine out of a hundred of us believe it to 
be. -And when we put it first, and make it the 
standard by which all things else are to be judged, 
Christ tells us plainly that we are falling into a 
temptation and a snare, and into many foolish 
and hurtful lusts ; we are piercing ourselves 
through with many sorrows. For once at least, 
then, let us try to look at money with His eyes 
and to weigh it in His balances. 

Christ was Himself a poor man. His mother 
was what to-day we should call a working-man's 
wife, and probably also the mother of a large 
family. When, as an infant, Jesus was presented 
in the Temple, the offering which His parents 



200 The Teaching of Jesus 

brought was that which the law prescribed in the 
case of the poor : " a pair of turtle doves or two 
young pigeons." When He came to manhood, 
and entered on His public ministry, He had no 
home He could call His own. In His Father's 
house, He said, were many mansions ; but on 
earth He had not where to lay His head. Women 
ministered unto Him of their substance. We 
never read that He had any money at all. When 
once He wanted to use a coin as an illustration, 
He borrowed it ; when, at another time, He needed 
one with which to pay a tax, He wrought a miracle 
in order to procure it. As He was dying, the 
soldiers, we are told, parted His garments among 
them — that was all there was to divide. When 
He was dead, men buried Him in another's tomb. 
More literally true than perhaps we always realize 
was the apostle's saying, " He became poor." 

Who, then, will deny that a man's life con- 
sisteth not in the abundance of the things which 
he possesseth ? Yet how strangely materialized 
our thoughts have become ! Our very language 
has been dragged down and made a partner with 
us in our fall. When, for example, our Authorized 
Version was written in i6i i, the translators could 
write, without fear of beiftg misunderstood, " Let 
no man seek his own, but every man another's 
wealth'' (i Cor. x. 24).^ But though the nobler 

1 Emerson had surely overlooked this nobler meaning of the 
word when he wrote, "They [the English] put up no Socratic 
prayer, much less any saintly prayer, for the queen's mind j ask 



Concerning Money 201 

meaning of the word still survives in "well" and 
" weal," " wealth " to-day is rarely used save to 
indicate abundance of material good. When 
Thackeray makes " Becky Sharp " say that she 
could be good if she had ;^4000 a year, and when 
Mr. Keir Hardie asks if it is possible for a man 
to be a Christian on a pound a week, the thoughts 
of many hearts are revealed. There is nothing 
to be done without money, we think ; money is 
the golden key which unlocks all doors ; money 
is the lever which removes all difficulties. This 
is what many of us are saying, and what most of 
us in our hearts are thinking. But clean across 
these spoken and unspoken thoughts of ours, 
there comes the life of Jesus, the man of Nazareth, 
to rebuke, and shame, and silence us. Who in 
His presence dare speak any more of the sovereign 
might of money ? 

This is the lesson of the life of the Best. Is 
it not also the lesson of the lives of the good in 
all ages ? The greatest name in the great world 
of Greece is Socrates ; and Socrates was a poor 
man. The greatest name in the first century of 
the Christian era is Paul ; and Paul was a working- 
man and sometimes in want. It was Calvinism, 
Mark Pattison said, that in the sixteenth century 
saved Europe, and Calvin's strength, a Pope once 
declared, lay in this, that money had no charm for 
him. John Wesley re-created modern England 

neither for light nor right, but say bhintly, 'grant her in health 
and wealth long to live ' " {English Traits), 



202 The Teaching of Tesus 

and left behind him " two silver teaspoons and 
the Methodist Church." The " Poets' Corner " 
in Westminster Abbey, it has been said, com- 
memorates a glorious company of paupers. And 
even in America, the land of the millionaire and 
multi-millionaire, the names that are graven on 
the nation's heart, and which men delight to 
honour, are not its Vanderbilts, or its Jay Goulds, 
but Lincoln, and Grant, and Garfield, and Webster, 
and Clay. 

This is not mere " curb -stone rhetoric"; I 
speak the words of soberness and truth. Would 
that they in whose blood the " narrowing lust of 
gold " has begun to burn might be sobered by 
them ! In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, and of 
all the noblest of the sons of men, let us deny 
and defy the sordid traditions of mammon ; let us 
make it plain that we at least do not believe " the 
wealthiest man among us is the best." " Godli- 
ness with contentment," said the apostle, " is great 
gain ; " and though these are not the only worthy 
ends of human effort, yet he who has made them 
his has secured for himself a treasure which faileth 
not, which will endure when the gilded toys for 
which men strive and sweat are dust and ashes. 

It is further worthy of note that it was always 
the rich rather than the poor whom Christ pitied. 
He was sorry for Lazarus ; He was still more 
sorry for Dives. " Blessed are ye poor. . . . 
Woe unto you that are rich." This two-fold note 
sounds through all Christ's teaching. And the 



Concerning Money 203 

reason is not far to seek. As Jesus looked on 
life, He saw how the passionate quest for gold 
was starving all the higher ideals of life. Men 
were concentrating their souls on pence till they 
could think of nothing else. For mammon's sake 
they were turning away from the kingdom of 
heaven. The spirit of covetousness was breaking 
the peace of households, setting brother against 
brother, making men hard and fierce and relent- 
less. Under its hot breath the fairest growths of 
the spirit were drooping and ready to die. The 
familiar " poor but pious " which meets us so often 
in a certain type of biography could never have 
found a place on the lips of Jesus. " Rich but 
pious " would have been far truer to the facts of 
life as He saw them. " The ground of a certain 
rich man brought forth plentifully," and after that 
he could think of nothing but barns : there was 
no room for God in his life. " The Pharisees who 
were lovers of money heard these things ; and 
they scoffed at Him ; " of course, what could their 
jaundiced eyes see in Jesus ? And even to one 
of whom it is written that Jesus, " looking upon 
him loved him," his great possessions proved a 
magnet stronger than the call of Christ. It was 
Emerson, I think, who said that the worst thing 
about money is that it so often costs so much. 
To take heed that we do not pay too dearly for it, 
is the warning which comes to us from every page 
of the life of Jesus. Are there none of us who 
need the warning ? " Ye cannot serve God and 



204 ~ The Teaching of J e sits 

mammon ; " we know it, and that we may the 
better serve mammon, we are sacrificing God and 
conscience on mammon's unholy altars. And to- 
day, perhaps, we are content that it should be so. 
But will our satisfaction last ? Shall we be as 
pleased with the bargain to-morrow and the day 
after as we think we are to-day ? And when our 
last day comes — what ? " Forefancy your death- 
bed," said Samuel Rutherford ; and though the 
counsel ill fits the mood of men in their youth 
and strength, it is surely well sometimes to look 
forward and ask how life will bear hereafter the 
long look back. " This night is thy soul required 
of thee ; and the things which thou hast prepared 
whose shall they be ? " — not his, and he had 
nothing else. He had laid up treasure for him- 
self, but it was all of this world's coinage ; of the 
currency of the land whither he went he had none. 
In one of Lowell's most striking poems he pictures 
the sad retrospect of one who, through fourscore 
years, had wasted on ignoble ends God's gift of 
life ; his hands had 

" plucked the world's coarse gains 
As erst they plucked the flowers of May ; " 

but what now, in life's last hours, are gains like 
these ? 

" God bends from out the deep and says, 
' I gave thee the great gift of life ; 
Wast thou not called in many ways ? 
Are not My earth and heaven at strife ? 



Conce7^ning Money 205 

I gave thee of My seed to sow, 

Bringest thou Me My hundred-fold?* 

Can I look up with face aglow, 

And answer, ' Father, here is gold ' ? • 

And the end of the poem is a wail : 

" I hear the reapers singing go 

Into God's harvest ; I, that might 
With them have chosen, here below 

Grope shuddering at the gates of night.** 

Wherefore let us set not our minds on the things 
that are upon earth ; let us covet earnestly the 
best gifts ; let us seek first the kingdom of God ; 
and all other things in due season and in due 
measure shall be added unto us.^ 

^ To those who are interested in the subject of this chapter 
Prof. Peabody's book already referred to, and an article entitled 
" The Teaching of Christ concerning the Use of Money " {Expositor, 
third series, vol. viii. p. lOO ff.) may be recommended. 



CONCERNING THE SECOND 
ADVENT 



207 



** Lo as some venturer, from his stars receiving 
Promise and presage of sublime emprise, 
Wears evermore the seal of his believing 
Deep in the dark of solitary eyes, 

Yea to the end, in palace or in prison, 
Fashions his fancies of the realm to be, 

Fallen from the height or from the deeps arisen, 
Ringed with the rocks and sundered of the sea ; — 

So ev^en I, and with a heart more burning, 
So even I, and with a hope more sweet, 

Groan for the hour, O Christ ! of Thy returning, 
Faint for the flaming of Thine advent feet." 

F. W. H. Myers, Saittt Paul. 



208 



XIV 

CONCERNING THE SECOND ADVENT 

«* They shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven 
with power and great glory. . . . Of that day and hour knoweth 
no one, not even the angels of heaven^ neither the Son^ but the Father 
(?«/j/."-^Matt. xxiv. 30, 36. 

THE doctrine of our Lord's Second Coming 
occupies at the present moment a curiously- 
equivocal position in the thought of the Christian 
Church. On the one hand by many it is wholly- 
ignored. There is no conscious disloyalty on 
their part to the word of God ; but the subject 
makes no appeal to them, it fails to " find " 
them. Ours is a sternly practical age, and any 
truth which does not readily link itself on to the 
necessities of life is liable speedily to be put on 
one side and forgotten. This is what has happened 
with this particular doctrine in the case of multi- 
tudes ; it is not denied, but it is banished to what 
Mr. Lecky calls " the land of the unrealized and 
the inoperative." But if, on the one hand, the 
doctrine has suffered from neglect, on the other 
it has suffered hardly less from undue attention. 
Indeed of late years the whole subject of the 
209 P 



2IO The Teaching of J esus 

" Last Things " has been turned into a kind of 
happy hunting-ground for little sects, who carry 
on a ceaseless wordy warfare both with them- 
selves and the rest of the Christian world. Men 
and women without another theological interest 
in the world are yet keen to argue about Mille- 
narianism, and to try their 'prentice hands on 
the interpretation of the imagery of the apocalyptic 
literature of both the Old Testament and the New. 
As Spurgeon used to say, they are so taken 
up with the second coming of our Lord that they 
forget to preach the first. So that one hardly 
knows which to regret more, the neglect and 
indifference of the one class, or the unhealthy, 
feverish absorption of the other. 

As very often happens in cases of this kind 
each extreme is largely responsible for the 
other. Neglect prepares the way for exaggera- 
tion ; exaggeration leads to further neglect. 
Moreover, in the case before us, both tendencies 
are strengthened by the very difficulty in which 
the subject is involved. Vagueness, uncertainty, 
mystery, attract some minds as powerfully as 
they repel others. And, assuredly, the element 
of uncertainty is not wanting here. In the first 
place, this is a subject for all our knowledge of 
which we are wholly dependent upon revelation. 
Much that Christ and His apostles have taught us 
we can bring to the test of experience and verify for 
ourselves. But this doctrine we must receive, if 
we receive it at all, wholly on the authority of 



Concerning the Second Advent 211 

One whom, on other grounds, we have learned to 
trust. Verification, in the nature of the case, is 
impossible. Further, we have gone but a little 
way when revelation itself becomes silent ; and, 
as I have said, when that guide leaves us, we 
enter at once the dark forest where instantly the 
track is lost. 

Let us seek to learn, then, what Christ has 
revealed, and what He has left unrevealed, con- 
cerning His coming again. 



As to the fact of Christ's coming we are 
left in no doubt. Our Lord's own declarations 
are as explicit as language can make them. 
Thus, in Matthew xvi. 27 we read that "the Son 
of Man shall come in the glory of His Father 
with His angels ; and then shall He render unto 
every man according to his deeds." In the great 
discourse on the Last Things, recorded by all the 
Synoptists, after speaking of the fall of Jerusalem, 
Christ goes on, *' Then shall appear the sign of 
the Son of Man in heaven ; and then shall all the 
tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the 
Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven 
with power and great glory." And again, in the 
Upper Room, He said to His disciples, " I go 
to prepare a place for you. And if I go and 
prepare a place for you, I come again, and will 
receive you unto Myself; that where I am ye 



2 1 2 T/ie Teaching of Jesus 

may be also." The hope of that return shines 
on every page of the New Testament : " This 
Jesus," said the angels to the watching disciples, 
^' which was received up from you into heaven, 
shall so come in like manner as ye beheld Him 
going into heaven." The early Christians were 
wont to speak, without further definition, of " that 
day." St. Paul reminds the Thessalonians how 
that they had " turned unto God from idols, to 
serve a living and true God, and to wait for 
His Son from heaven." Maran atha — " our Lord 
Cometh " — was the great watchword of the waiting 
Church. When, at the table of the Lord, they 
ate the bread and drank the cup, they proclaimed 
His death " till He come." " Amen ; come, Lord 
Jesus," is the passionate cry with which our English 
Scriptures close. 

For all those, then, to whom the New Testa- 
ment speaks with authority, the fact of Christ's 
return is established beyond all controversy. But 
what will be the nature of His coming? Will 
it be visible and personal, or spiritual and unseen ? 
Will it be once and never again, or repeated ? 
Will Christ come at the end of history, or is He 
continually coming in those great crises which 
mark the world's progress towards its appointed 
end ? These questions have been answered with 
such admirable simplicity and scriptural truth by 
Dr. Denney that I cannot do better than quote 
his words : " It may be frankly admitted," he 
says, "that the return of Christ to His disciples 



Concerning the Second Advent 2 1 3 

is capable of different interpretations. He came 
again, though it were but intermittently, when He 
appeared to them after His resurrection. He 
came again, to abide with them permanently, 
when His Spirit was given to the Church at 
Pentecost. He came, they would all feel who 
lived to see it, signally in the destruction of 
Jerusalem, when God executed judgment histori- 
cally on the race which had rejected Him, and 
when the Christian Church was finally and 
decisively liberated from the very possibility of 
dependence on the Jewish. He comes still, as 
His own words to the High Priest suggest — From 
this time on ye shall see the Son of Man coming 
— in the great crises of history, when the old 
order changes, yielding place to the new ; when 
God brings a whole age, as it were, into judg- 
ment, and gives the world a fresh start. But all 
these admissions, giving them the widest possible 
application, do not enable us to call in question 
what stands so plainly in the pages of the New 
Testament, — what filled so exclusively the minds 
of the first Christians — the idea of a personal 
return of Christ at the end of the world. We 
need lay no stress on the scenery of New Testa- 
ment prophecy, any more than on the similar 
element of Old Testament prophecy ; the voice 
of the archangel and the trump of God are like 
the turning of the sun into darkness and the 
moon into blood ; but if we are to retain any 
relation to the New Testament at all, we must 



2 1 4 The Teaching of Jesus 

assert the personal return of Christ as Judge 
of all." ^ 

So far I think is clear. It is when we come 
to speak of the time of our Lord's return that our 
difficulties begin. It appears to me impossible 
to doubt that the first Christians were looking 
for the immediate return of our Lord to the earth. 
At one time even St. Paul seems to have expected 
Him within his own life -time. Nor does this 
fact in itself cause us any serious perplexity. 
What does perplex us is to find in the Gospels 
language attributed to Christ which apparently 
makes Him a supporter of this mistaken view. 
E.g.^ we have these three separate sayings, recorded 
in St. Matthew's Gospel : '' But when they perse- 
cute you in this city, flee into the next ; for verily 
I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone through 
the cities of Israel, till the Son of Man be come " 
(x. 23); "Verily I say unto you. There be some 
of them that stand here, which shall in no wise 
taste of death, till they see the Son of Man com- 
ing in His kingdom" (xvi. 28); "Verily I say 
unto you. This generation shall not pass away, 
till all these things be accomplished" (xxiv. 34). 
This seems plain enough ; and if we are to take 
the words as they stand, we seem to be shut up 
to the conclusion that our Lord was mistaken, 
that He ventured on a prediction which events 
have falsified. Let us see if this really be so. I 
leave, for the moment, the words I have quoted 

1 Studies in Theology^ p. 239. 



Conce7'-ning the Second Advent 2 1 5 

in order to cite other words which point in a quite 
different direction. 

To begin with, we have the emphatic state- 
ment : " But of that day and hour knoweth no 
one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the 
Son, but the Father only." We remember also 
Christ's words to His disciples, on the eve of the 
Ascension, " It is not for you to know times or 
seasons, which the Father hath set within His 
own authority." There is, further, a whole class 
of sayings, exhortations, and parables, which seem 
plainly to involve a prolonged Christian era, and, 
consequently, the postponement to a far distant 
time, of the day of Christ's return. Thus, there 
are the passages which speak of the preaching of 
the gospel to the nations beyond : " Wheresoever 
the gospel shall be preached throughout the whole 
world, that also which this woman hath done shall 
be spoken of for a memorial of her " (Mark xiv. 9); 
" This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in 
the whole world for a testimony unto all the nations; 
and then shall the end come" (Matt. xxiv. 14). 
There is the parable which tells of the tarrying 
of the bridegroom till even the wise virgins 
slumbered and slept. " After a long time," we 
read in another parable, " the Lord of those 
servants cometh and maketh a reckoning with 
them." What is the significance of the parable 
of the leaven hid in three measures of meal, and 
still more, of that group of parables which depict 
the growth of the kingdom — the parables of the 



2 1 6 The Teaching of Jesus 

sower, the wheat and tares, the mustard -seed, 
and the seed growing gradually ? Does not all 
this point not to a great catastrophe nigh at 
hand, which should bring to an end the existing 
order of things, but rather to just such a future 
for the kingdom of God on earth as the actual 
course of history reveals ? And this, and no 
other, was, I believe, the impression which 
Christ desired to leave on the minds of His 
disciples. 

What, then, are we to make of those other 
and apparently contrary words which I have 
quoted, but meanwhile have left unexplained ? 
They constitute, without doubt, one of the most 
perplexing problems which the interpreter of the 
New Testament has to face,^ and any suggestion 
for meeting the difficulty must be made with 
becoming caution. I can but briefly indicate the 
direction in which the probable solution may be 
found. Our Lord, as we have already seen, 
spoke of His coming again, not only at the end 
of the world, but in the course of it : in the 
power of His Spirit, at the fall of Jerusalem, in 
the coming of His kingdom among men. But 
the minds of the disciples were full of the thought 
of His final coming, which would establish for 
ever the glory of His Messianic kingdom ; and 
it would seem that this fact has determined both 

1 *' There is no subject on which it is more difficult to ascertain 
the teaching of Christ than that which relates to the future of the 
kingdom." — A. B. Bruce, The Kingdom of God, p. 273. 



Concerning the Second Advent 2 1 7 

the form and the setting of some of Christ's 
sayings which they have preserved for us. 
Words which He meant to refer to Israel's 
coming judgment-day they, in the ardour of 
their expectation, referred to the last great day. 
In the first Gospel, especially, we may trace 
some such influence at work. When, e.g., Matthew 
represents our Lord as saying, '' There be some 
of them that stand here which shall in no wise 
taste of death till they see the Son of Man 
coming in His kingdom," it is evident, both from 
the words themselves and from the context, that 
he understood them to refer to the final return. 
Luke, however, speaks only of seeing " the 
kingdom of God," and Mark of seeing "the 
kingdom of God come in power." And if these 
words were our only version of the prophecy they 
would present no difficulty ; we should feel that 
they had received adequate fulfilment in the 
events of the great day of Pentecost. We con- 
clude, therefore, " that of the three reports before 
us the second and third, which are practically the 
same, reproduce more correctly the words actually 
spoken by Christ ; and that the account given 
in the first Gospel was coloured by the eager hope 
of the early followers of Christ for their Master's 
speedy return." -^ 

To sum up in a sentence the results of this 
brief inquiry : Christ's teaching concerning His 
return leaves us both in a state of certainty and 

1 J. Agar Beet, The Last Things^ p. 46. 



2 1 8 The Teaching of Jesus 

uncertainty. " We believe that Thou shalt come 
to be our Judge " — that is our certainty ; " Of 
that day and hour knoweth no one " — that is our 
uncertainty. And each of these carries with it 
its own lesson. 



II 

" Of that day and hour knoweth no one ; " 
and we must be content not to know. There are 
things that are " revealed " ; and they belong to us 
and to our children. And there are " secret things," 
which belong ne'ther to us, nor to our children, 
but to God. Just as a vijitor to Holyrood Palace 
finds some rooms open and free, through which 
he may wander at will, while from others he is 
strictly excluded, so in God's world there are 
locked doors through which it is not lawful for 
any man to enter. And it is our duty to be 
faithful to our ignorance as well as to our know- 
ledge. There is a Christian as well as an anti- 
Christian agnosticism. To pry into the secret 
things of God is no less a sin than wilfully to 
remain ignorant of what He has been pleased to 
rr\ake known. The idly inquisitive spirit which is 
never at rest save when it is poking into forbidden 
corners, Christ always checks and condemns. 
** Lord," asked one, " are there few that be saved ? " 
But He would give no answer save this : " Strive to 
enter in by the narrow door." " Lord, and this man 
what ? " said Peter, curious concerning the un- 



Concerning the Second Advent 219 

revealed future of his brother apostle. But again 
idle curiosity must go unsatisfied : " If I will that 
he tarry till I come, what is that to thee ? Follow 
thou Me." " Lord dost Thou at this time restore 
the kingdom to Israel ? " But once more He will 
give no answer : " It is not for you to know the 
times or seasons which the Father hath set 
within His own authority." And yet, strangely 
enough, that which Christ has seen good to leave 
untold is the one thing concerning His coming on 
which the minds of multitudes have fastened. It 
says little, either for our religion or our common- 
sense, that one of the most widely circulated re- 
ligious newspapers of our day is one which fills its 
columns with absurd guesses and forecasts con- 
cerning those very "times" and "seasons" of which 
Christ has told us that it is not for us to know. 
Christ has given us no detailed map of the future, 
and when foolish persons pester us with little 
maps of their own making, let us to see to it that 
they get no encouragement from us. Let us dare 
always to be faithful to our ignorance. 

But if there is much we do not know, this we 
do know : the Lord will come. And, alike on 
the ground of what we know and of what we do 
not know, our duty is clear : we must " watch," so 
that whether He come at even, or at midnight, or 
at cock-crowing, or in the morning, He shall find 
us ready. Christ's solemn injunction left an in- 
delible mark on the mind of the Early Church. 
"Yourselves know perfectly," St. Paul writes in 



2 20 The Teaching of Jesus 

the first of his apostolic letters, " that the day of 
the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night ... so 
then let us not sleep, as do the rest, but let us watch 
and be sober." As St. Augustine says, " The last 
day is hidden that every day maybe regarded." But 
what, exactly, is the meaning of the command to 
" watch " ? It cannot be that we are to be always 
" on the watch." That would simply end in the 
feverish excitement and unrest which troubled 
the peace of the Church of Thessalonica. The 
true meaning is given us, I think, in the parable 
of the Ten Virgins. Five w^ere wise, not because 
they -watched all night for the bridegroom, for it 
is written " they all slumbered and slept," but 
because they were prepared ; and five were 
foolish, not because they did not watch, but 
because they were unprepared. " The fisherman's 
wife who spends her time on the pier-head watch- 
ing for the boats, cannot be so well prepared to 
give her husband a comfortable reception as the 
woman who is busy about her household work, 
and only now and again turns a longing look 
seaward." ^ So Christ's command to " watch " 
means, not " Be ye always on the watch," but, 
' Be ye always ready." 

Spurgeon once said, with characteristic humour 
and good sense, that there were friends of his to 
whom he would like to say, " Ye men of Ply- 
mouth, why stand ye gazing up into heaven ? 
Go on with your work." He who in a w^orld like 

1 Marcus Dods, The Parables of our Lord (first series), p. 238. 



Concerning the Second Advent 221 

ours can sit and gaze with idly folded hands — 
let not that man think he shall receive anything 
of the Lord. A lady once asked John Wesley, 
" Suppose that you knew you were to die at 
twelve o'clock to-morrow night, how would you 
spend the intervening time ? " " How, Madam ? " 
he replied ; " why just as 1 intend to spend it 
now. I should preach this night at Gloucester, 
and again at five to-morrow morning. After that 
I should ride to Tewkesbury, preach in the after- 
noon, and meet the societies in the evening. I 
should then repair to friend Martin's house, who 
expects to entertain me, converse and pray with 
the family as usual, retire to my room at ten 
o'clock, commend myself to my heavenly Father, 
lie down to rest, and wake up in glory." This is 
the right attitude for the Christian. The old cry 
must not fade from our lips, nor the old hope 
from our heart : Maran atha, " our Lord cometh." 
But meanwhile He hath given to every man his 
work ; and we may be sure there is no prepara- 
tion for His coming like the faithful doing of 
the appointed task. " Blessed is that servant 
whom His Lord when He cometh shall find so 
doing." 



CONCERNING THE JUDGMENT 



223 • 



" I often have a kind of waking dream ; up one road the image 
of a man decked and adorned as if for a triumph, carried up 
by rejoicing and exuhing friends, who praise his goodness and 
a.chievements ; and, on the other road, turned back to back to it, 
there is the very man himself, in sordid and squalid apparel, 
surrounded not by friends but by ministers of justice, and going 
on, while his friends are exultir 
judgment." — R. W. Church. 



124 



XV 

CONCERNING THE JUDGMENT 

" When the Son of Man shall come in His glory ^ and all the 
angels with Him^ then shall He sit on the throne of His glory: and 
before Him shall be gathered all the nations : and He shall separate 
them one from another ^ as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the 
goats : and He shall set the sheep on His right hand^ but the goats 
onthe left," — Matt. xxv. 31-33. 

HE, the speaker, will do this. It is the most 
stupendous claim that ever fell from 
human lips. A young Jewish carpenter whose 
brief career, as He Himself well knew, was just 
about to end in a violent and shameful death, 
tells the little, fearful band which still clung to 
Him, that a day is coming when before Him all 
the nations shall be gathered, and by Him be 
separated as a shepherd separateth the sheep 
from the goats. In the world's long history there 
is nothing like it. 

That Jesus did really claim to be the Judge of 
all men, it is, I believe, impossible to doubt. The 
passage just quoted is by no means our only 
evidence. In the Sermon on the Mount, which 
foolish persons who love to depreciate theology 
sometimes speak of as though it were the pith 

225 Q 



2 26 The Teaching of J esiLs 

and marrow of the Christian gospel, Christ says, 
'' Many will say to Me in that day, Lord, Lord, 
did we not prophesy by Thy name, and by Thy 
name cast out devils, and by Thy name do many 
mighty works? And then will I profess unto 
them, I never knew you : depart from I\le, ye 
that work iniquity." Again, He says, " Whosoever 
shall be ashamed of Me and of My words in this 
adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man 
also shall be ashamed of Him when He cometh 
in the glory of His Father with the holy angels ; " 
and again, " The Son of Man shall come in the 
glory of His Father with His angels ; and then 
shall He render unto every man according to His 
deeds." The fourth Gospel also represents Him 
as saying, " Neither doth the Father judge any 
man, but He hath given all judgment to the Son 
. . and He gave Him authority to execute judg- 
ment because He is the Son of Man." And if 
still further evidence be necessary it would be 
easy to show both from the Acts and the Epistles 
that from the very beginning all the disciples of 
Jesus believed and taught that He would come 
again to be their Judge. 

Consider what this means. Reference has 
already been made in an earlier chapter to Christ's 
witness concerning Himself, to His deep and un- 
wavering consciousness of separateness from all 
others. But more striking, perhaps, than any 
illustration mentioned there is that furnished by 
the fact before us now. What must His thoughts 



Concerning the Judgment 227 

about Himself have been who could speak of 
Himself in relation to all others as Christ does 
here? When men write about Jesus as though 
He were merely a gentle, trustful, religious genius, 
preaching a sweet gospel of the love of God to 
the multitudes of Galilee, they are but shutting 
their eyes to one half of the facts which it is thcT 
duty to explain. Speaking generally, we do well 
to distrust the dilemma as a form of argument ; 
but 'in this case there need be no hesitation in 
putting the alternative with all possible bluntness : 
either Christ was God, or He was not good. 
That Jesus, if He were merely a good man, with 
a good man's consciousness of and sensitiveness to 
His own weakness and limitations, could yet have 
arrogated to Himself the right to be the supreme 
judge and final arbiter of the destinies of mankind, 
is simply not thinkable. And the more we ponder 
the stupendous claim which Christ makes, the 
more must we feel that it is either superhuman 
authority which speaks to us here or superhuman 
arrogance. Either Christ spoke out of the depths 
of His own Divine consciousness, knowing that 
the Father had committed all judgment unto the 
Son ; or He made use of words and put forth 
claims which were, and which He must have 
known to have been, empty, false, and blasphemous. 
Such is the significance of Christ's words in 
their relation to Himself It is, however, with 
their relation to ourselves that we are primarily 
concerned now. Of the wholly unimaginable cir- 



228 The Teaching of JesMs 

cumstances of that day when the Son of Man 
shall come in His glory and all the nations be 
gathered before Him I shall not attempt to speak. 
As Dean Church has well said,^ no vision framed 
with the materials of our present experience could 
adequately represent the truth, and, indeed, it is 
well that our minds should be diverted from 
matters which lie wholly beyond our reach, that 
they may dwell upon the solemn certainties which 
Christ has revealed. Let us think, first of the 
fact, and secondly of the issues, of Judgment 



The persistent definiteness with which the 
fact of judgment is affirmed by the New Testa- 
ment we have already seen. Nor is the New 
Testament our only witness. The belief in a 
higher tribunal before which the judgments of time 
are to be revised, and in many cases reversed, 
may be said to be part of the creed of the race. 
Plato had his vision of judgment as well as Jesus. 
And in the Old Testament, and especially in the 
Book of Psalms, the same faith finds repeated 
and magnificent utterance : " Our God shall come, 
and shall not keep silence ; a fire shall devour 
before Him, and it shall be very tempestuous 
round about Him. He shall call to the heavens 
above, and to the earth, that He may judge His 
people ; " and again, " For He cometh, for He 

* Cathedral and University Sermons^ p. lO, 



Concerning the Judgment 229 

cometh to judge the earth : He shall judge the 
world with righteousness and the peoples with 
His truth." 

Here, then, is the fact which demands a place 
in the thoughts of each of us — we are all to be 
judged. Life is not to be folded up, like a piece 
of finished work, and then laid aside and for- 
gotten ; it is to be gone over again and examined 
by the hand and eyes of Perfect Wisdom and 
Perfect Love. Each day we are writing, and 
often when the leaf is turned that which has been 
written passes from our mind and is remembered 
no more ; but it is there, and one day the books 
— the Book of Life, of our life — will be opened, 
and the true meaning of the record revealed. Life 
brings to us many gifts of many kinds, and as it 
lays them in our hands, for our use and for our 
blessing, it is always, had we but ears to hear, 
with the warning word, " Know thou, that for all 
these things, God will bring thee into judgment." 

It is, indeed, a tremendous thought. When 
Daniel Webster was once asked what was the 
greatest thought that had ever occupied his mind, 
he answered, " the fact of my personal account- 
ability to God." And no man can give to such 
a fact its due place without feeling its steadying, 
sobering influence through all his life. Lament 
is often made to-day, and not without reason, of 
our failing sense of the seriousness of life. A 
plague of frivolity, more deadly than the locusts 
of Egypt, has fallen upon us, and is smiting all 



230 TJie Teaching of Jesus 

our green places with barrenness. Somehow, and 
at all costs, we must get back our lost sense of 
responsibility. If we would remember that God 
has a right hand and a left hand ; if we would 
put to ourselves Browning's question, " But what 
will God say } " if sometimes we would pull 
ourselves up sharp, and ask — this that I am 
doing, how will it look then, in that day when 
" Each shall stand full-face with all he did below " ? 
if, I say, we would do this, could life continue to 
be the thing of shows and make-believe it so 
often is ? It was said of the late Dean Church 
by one who knew him well : " He seemed to live 
in the constant recollection of something which is 
awful, even dreadful to remember — something 
which bears with searching force on all men's 
ways and hopes and plans — something before 
which he knew himself to be as it were con- 
tinually arraigned — something which it was strange 
and pathetic to find so little recognized among 
other men." But, alas ! this is how we refuse to 
live. We thrust the thought of judgment from 
us ; we treat it as an unwelcome intruder, a 
disturber of our peace ; we block up every 
approach by which it might gain access to our 
minds. We do not deny that there is a judgment 
to come ; but our habitual disregard of it is verily 
amazing. " Judge not," said Christ, " that ye be 
not judged ;" yet every day we let fly our random 
arrows, careless in whose hearts they may lodge. 
" Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall 



Concerning the Judgment 2 3 1 

give account thereof in the day of judgment ; " 
yet with what superb recklessness do we abuse 
God's great gift of speech ! " We shall all stand 
before the judgment-seat of God ; " yes, we know 
it ; but when do we think of it ? What difference 
does it make to us ? 

What can indifference such as this say for 
itself? How can it justify itself before the bar 
of reason ? Do we realize that our neglect has 
Christ to reckon with ? These things of which 
I have spoken are not the gossamer threads of 
human speculation ; they are the strong cords of 
Divine truth and they cannot be broken. " You 
seem, sir," said Mrs. Adams to Dr. Johnson, in 
one of his despondent hours, when the fear of 
death and judgment lay heavy on him, "to forget 
the merits of our Redeemer." " Madam," said 
the honest old man, " I do not forget the merits 
of my Redeemer ; but my Redeemer has said 
that He will set some on His right hand and 
some on His left." Yes, it is the words of Christ 
with which we have to do ; and if we are wise, 
if we know the things which belong unto our 
peace, we shall find for them a place within our 
hearts. 



II 

The issues of the Judgment may be summed 
up in a single word — separation: "He shall 
set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats 



232 The Teaching of J estts 

on the left." Stated thus broadly, the issue of 
the Judgment satisfies our sense of justice. If 
there is to be judgment at all, separation must 
be the outcome. And in that separation is 
vindicated one of man's most deep-seated con- 
victions. As right is right and wrong is wrong, 
and right and wrong are not the same, so neither 
can their issues be the same. " We have a robust 
common -sense of morality which refuses to 
believe that it does not matter whether a man 
has lived like the Apostle Paul or the Emperor 
Nero." We " can never crush out the conviction 
that there must be one place for St. John, who 
was Jesus' friend, and another for Judas Iscariot, 
who was His betrayer." ^ This must be, 

" Else earth is darkness at the core, 
And dust and ashes all that is." 

We must be sure that God has a right hand and 
a left, that good and evil are distinct, and will for 
ever remain so, that each will go to his own 
place, the place for which he is prepared, for 
which he has prepared himself, or our day would 
be turned into night and our whole life put to 
confusion. 

So far, Christ's words present no difficulty. 
To many, however, it is a serious perplexity to 
find that Christ speaks of but two classes into 
which by the Judgment men are divided. There 
are the sheep and the goats, the good and the 

1 John Watson, The Mind of the Master^ pp. 203, 204. 



Concern ing the Judgment 233 

bad, and there are no others. To us it seems 
impossible to divide men thus. They are not, 
we think, good or bad, but good and bad. " I 
can understand," some one has said, " what is to 
become of the sheep, and I can understand what 
is to become of the goats, but how are the 
alpacas to be dealt with ? " ^ The alpaca, it 
should be said, is an animal possessing some of 
the characteristics both of the sheep and the goat, 
and the meaning of the question is, of course, 
what is to become of that vast middle class in 
whose lives sometimes good and sometimes evil 
seems to rule ? 

Now it is a remarkable fact that Scripture 
knows nothing of any such middle class. Some 
men it calls good, others it calls evil, but it has 
no middle term. Note, eg., this typical contrast 
from the Book of Proverbs : " The path of the 
righteous is as the hght of dawn, that shineth 
more and more unto the noon-tide of the day. 
The way of the wicked is as darkness ; they 
know not at what they stumble." Or listen to 
Peter's question : " If the righteous is scarcely 
saved, where shall the ungodly and sinner 
appear ? " In both instances the assumption is 

^ See T. G. Selby's Tniperfed Angel and other Sermons , p. 21 1. 
Cf. Zachariah Coleman in "Mark Rutherford's" Revohdion in 
Tanner's Lane: "That is a passage that I never could quite 
understand. I never hardly see a pure breed, either of goat or 
sheep. I never see anybody who deserves to go straight to heaven 
or who deserves to go straight to hell. When the Judgment Day 
comes it will be a diflicult task." 



234 The Teaching of Jesus 

the same: there, on the one hand, are the 
righteous ; and there, on the other, are the 
wicked ; and beside these there are no others. 
The same classification is constant throughout the 
teaching of Jesus. He speaks of two gates, and 
two ways, and two ends. There are the guests 
who accept the King's invitation and sit down in 
His banqueting hall, and there are those who 
refuse it and remain without. In the parable of 
the net full of fishes the good are gathered into 
vessels, but the bad are cast away. The wheat 
and the tares grow together until the harvest ; 
then the wheat is gathered into the barn, and the 
tares are cast into the fire. The sheep are set on 
the right hand, and the goats on the left hand ; 
and there is no hint or suggestion that any other 
kind of classification is necessary in order that all 
men may be truly and justly dealt with. 

All this may seem very arbitrary and impos- 
sible until we remember that the classification 
is not ours but God's. It is not we who have to 
divide men, setting one on the right hand and 
another on the left ; that is God's work ; and it 
is well to remind ourselves that He invites none 
of us to share His judgment-throne with Him, or, 
by any verdict of ours, to anticipate the findings 
of the last great day. And because to us such a 
division is impossible, it does not therefore follow 
that it should be so to Him before whom all hearts 
are open and all desires known. We cannot 
separate men thus because human character is so 



Concerning the Judgment 235 

complex. But complexity is a relative term; it 
depends on the eyes which behold it ; and our 
naming a thing complex may be but another 
way of declaring our ignorance concerning it. 
We all know how a character, a life, a course of 
events, which, on first view, seemed but a tangled, 
twisted skein, on closer acquaintance often smooths 
itself out into perfect simplicity. And there is 
surely no difficulty in believing that it should be 
so with human life when it is judged by the per- 
fect knowledge of God. Life is like a great tree 
which casts forth on every side its far-spreading 
branches. Yet all that moving, breathing mystery 
of twig and branch and foliage springs from a 
single root. To us the mystery is baffling in its 
complexity : we have looked at the branches. To 
God it is simple, clear : He sees the hidden root 
from which it springs. So that, to go back to 
our former illustration, it is only our ignorance 
which compels us to speak of " alpacas " in the 
moral world. To perfect knowledge they will 
prove to be, as Mr. Selby says, either slightly- 
disguised sheep or slightly-disguised goats. 

There is a further fact also to be taken into 
account in considering Christ's two-fold classifica- 
tion. Since it is the work of infinite knowledge 
and justice it will have regard to all the facts of 
our life. God looks not only at the narrow pre- 
sent, but back into the past, and forward into the 
future. He marks the trend of the life, the bent 
and bias of the soul. He chalks down no line 



236 The Teaching of Jesus 

saying, " Reach this or you are undone for ever." 
He sets up no absolute standard to which if a 
man attain he is a saint, or falling short of which 
he is a sinner. And when He calls one man 
righteous and another wicked, He means very 
much more than that one has done so many 
good deeds, and another so many evil deeds ; 
" righteous " and " wicked " describe what each is 
in himself, what each will decisively reveal himself 
to be, when present tendencies have fully worked 
themselves out. There are two twilights, the 
twilight of evening and the twilight of morning ; 
and therefore God's question to us is not, how 
much light have we? but, which way do we face? 
to the night or to the day ? Not " What art 
thou?" but "What wilt thou?" is the supreme 
question ; it is the answer to this which sets some 
on the right hand and some on the left. 

Let us close as we began, remembering that 
it is Christ who is to be our Judge. Therefore 
will the judgment be according to perfect truth. 
We know how He judged men when He was 
here on earth — without respect of persons, unde- 
ceived by appearances, seeing things always as 
they are, calling them always by their true names. 
And such will His judgment be hereafter. On 
the walls of the famous Rock Tombs of Thebes, 
there is a group of figures representing the judging 
of the departed spirit before Osiris, the presid- 
ing deity of the dead. In one hand he holds a 



Conce rn ing the Jtidg7nent 237 

shepherd's crook, in the other a scourge ; before 
him are the scales of justice ; that which is weighed 
is the heart of the dead king upon whose lot the 
deity is called to decide. The pictured symbol is 
a dim foreshadowing of that perfect judgment 
which He who looketh not at the outward appear- 
ance but at the heart will one day pass on all the 
lives of men. And yet an apostle has dared to 
write of " boldness in the day of Judgment " ! 
Surely St. John is very bold ; yet was his boldness 
well-based. He remembered the saying of his 
own Gospel : " The Father hath given all judg- 
ment unto the Son . . . because He is the Son 
of Man." Yes ; He who will come to be our 
Judge is He who once for us men, and for our 
salvation, came down from heaven, and was made 
man, and upon the Cross did suffer death for our 
redemption. Herein is the secret of the " bold- 
ness " of the redeemed. 

" Jesus, Thy blood and righteousness 
My beauty are, my glorious dress ; 
*Midst flaming worlds in these arrayed, 
With joy shall I lift up my head. 

Bold shall I stand in that great day, 
For who aught to my charge shall lay ? 
Fully absolved through these I am. 
From sin and fear, from guilt and shame." 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 



239 



My knowledge of that life is small, 

The eye of faith is dim ; 
But 'tis enough that Christ knows all. 

And I shall be with Him." 

Richard Baxter. 



240 



XVI 

CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 

*• Where neither moth nor rust doth consume^ and where thieves 
do not break through nor steal. " — Matt. vi. 20. 

" Where their worm dieth not^ and the fire is not quenched.^'' — 
Mark ix. 48. 

THESE are both sayings of Christ, and each 
has reference to the life beyond death ; 
together they illustrate the two-fold thought of the 
future which finds a place in all the records of our 
Lord's teaching. 

Popular theology, it is sometimes said, seriously 
misunderstands and misinterprets Jesus. And so 
far as the theology of the future life is concerned 
there need be no hesitation in admitting that, not 
unfrequently, it has been disfigured by an almost 
grotesque literalism. The pulpit has often for- 
gotten that over -statement is always a blunder, 
and that any attempt to imagine the wholly 
unimaginable is most likely to end in defeating 
our own intentions and in dissipating, rather than 
reinforcing, our sense of the tremendous realities 
of which Christ spoke. Nevertheless, much as 
theology may have erred in the form of its teaching 

241 R 



242 The Teaching of Jesus 

concerning the future, its great central ideas have 
always been derived direct from Christ. It has 
not, we know, always made its appeal to what is 
highest in man ; it has sometimes spoken of 
" heaven " and " hell " in a fashion that has left 
heart and conscience wholly untouched ; neverthe- 
less, the time has not yet come — until men cease 
to believe in Christ, the time never will have 
come — for banishing these words from our vocabu- 
lary. Unless Christ were both a deceiver and 
deceived, they represent realities as abiding as God 
and the soul, realities towards which it behoves 
every man of us to discover how he stands. In 
the teaching of Jesus, no less than in the teaching of 
popular theology, the future has a bright side and it 
has a dark side ; there is a heaven and there is a hell. 



That there is a life beyond this life, that 
death does not end all, is of course always assumed 
in the teaching of Jesus. But it is much more 
than this that we desire to know. What kind of 
a life is it ? What are its conditions ? How is it 
related to the present life ? What is the " glory " 
into which, as we believe, " the souls of believers at 
their death do immediately pass " ? Perhaps our 
first impression, as we search the New Testament 
for an answer to our questions, is one of disappoint- 
ment ; there is so much that still remains un- 
revealed. We do indeed read of dead men raised 



Concerning the Future Life 243 

to life again by the power of God, but of the 
awful and unimaginable experiences through which 
they passed not a word is told. 

"* Where wert thou, brother, those four days?* 
There lives no record of reply. 
• ••••• 

Behold a man raised up by Christ I 
The rest reinaineth unreveal'd ; 
He told it not ; or something seal'd 
The lips of that Evangelist." 

How much even Christ Himself has left untold ! 
At His incarnation, and again at His resurrection, 
He came forth from that world into which we all 
must pass ; yet how few were His words concern- 
ing it, how little able we still are to picture it ! 
Nevertheless, if He has not told us all, He has 
told us enough. Let us recall some of His words. 
He spoke of " everlasting habitations " — 
" eternal tabernacles " — into which men should be 
received. Here we are as pilgrims and sojourners, 
dwelling in a land not our own. 

** Earth's but a sorry tent, 

Pitched but a few frail days ;* 

and the chances and changes of this mortal life 
often bear heavily upon us. But there these 
things have no place. Moth and rust, change and 
decay, sorrow and death cannot enter there. 

"The day's aye fair 

r the land o' the leal.** 

Again, Christ said," I go to prepare a place for 



244 The Teaching of Jesus 

you." Just as when a little child is born into the 
world it comes to a place made ready for it by 
the thousand little tendernesses of a mother's love, 
so does death lead us, not into the bleak, in- 
hospitable night, but into the " Father's house," to 
a place which love has made ready for our coming. 
" Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." 
Into Thy hands — thither Jesus passed from the 
Cross and the cruel hands of men ; thither have 
passed the lost ones of our love ; thither, too, we 
in our turn shall pass. Why, then, if we believe 
in Jesus should we be afraid ? " Having death 
for my friend,'* says an unknown Greek writer, 
" I tremble not at shadows." Having Jesus for our 
friend we tremble not at death. 

Further, Christ taught us, the heavenly life is a 
life of service. Every one knows how largely the 
idea of rest has entered into our common con- 
ceptions of the future. It is indeed a pathetic 
commentary on the weariness and restlessness of life 
that with so many rest should almost have come 
to be a synonym for blessedness. But rest is far 
from being the final word of Scripture concerning 
the life to come. Surely life, with its thousand- 
fold activities, is not meant as a preparation for a 
Paradise of inaction. What can be the meaning 
and purpose of the life which we are called to pass 
through here, if our hereafter is to be but one 
prolonged act of adoration ? We shall carry with 
us into the future not character only but capacity; 
and can it be that God will lay aside as useless 



Concerning the Future Life 245 

there that which with so great pains He has sought 
to perfect here ? It is not so that Christ has 
taught us to think : '' He that received the five 
talents came and brought other five talents, saying, 
Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents : lo, I 
have gained other five talents. His lord said unto 
him, Well done, good and faithful servant : thou 
hast been faithful over a few things, I will set thee 
over many things : ent^r thou into the joy of thy 
lord." God will not take the tools out of the 
workman's hands just when he has learned how 
to handle them; He will not "pension off" His 
servants just when they are best able to serve 
Him. The reward of work well done is more 
work ; faithfulness in few things brings lordship 
over many. Have we not here a ray of light on 
the mystery of unfinished lives ? We do not 
murmur when the old and tired are gathered 
to their rest ; but when little children die, 
when youth falls in life's morning, when the 
strong man is cut off in his strength, we know not 
what to say. But do not " His servants serve 
Him " there as well as here ? Their work is not 
done ; in ways beyond our thoughts it is going 
forward still.^ 

One other question concerning the future with 
which, as by an instinct, we turn to Christ for 
answer is suggested by the following touching 
little poem : 

1 See the very striking and beautiful chapter entitled "The 
Continuity of Life " in Watson's Mind of the Master. 



246 The Teaching of Jesus 

" I can recall so well how she would look — 
How at the very murmur of her dress 
On entering the room, the whole room took 
An air of gentleness. 

That was so long ago, and yet his eyes 
Had always afiervvards the look that waits 
And yearns, and waits again, nor can disguise 
Something it contemplates. 

May we irriagine it ? The sob, the tears. 
The long, sweet, shuddering breath ; then on her breast 
The great, full, flooding sense of endless years, 
Of heaven, and her, and rest." 

Can we quote the authority of Jesus for thoughts 
like these? The point is, let it be noted, not 
whether we shall know each other again beyond 
death, but whether we shall be to each other what 
we were here. At the foot of the white marble 
cross which his wife placed upon the grave of 
Charles Kingsley are graven these three words : 
Amavimus, Amamus, Amabiimis (" We have loved, 
we love, we shall love "). After Mrs. Browning's 
death her husband wrote these lines from Dante 
in her Testament : " Thus I believe, thus I affirm, 
thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall 
pass to another better, there, where that lady lives, 
of whom my soul was enamoured." Will Christ 
counter-sign a hope like this ? I do not know any 
" proof-text " that can be quoted, yet it were pro- 
fanation to think otherwise. There are many 
flowers of time, we know, which cannot be trans- 
planted ; but " love never faileth," love is the true 
immortelle. And whatever changes death may 



Concerning the Future Life 247 

bring, those who have been our nearest here shall 
be our nearest there. And though, as I say, we 
can quote no " proof-text," our faith may find its 
guarantee in the great word of Jesus : " If it were 
not so, I would have told you." This is one of 
the instincts of the Christian heart, as pure and good 
as it is firm and strong. Since Christ let it pass 
unchallenged, may we not claim His sanction for 
it? If it were not so. He would have told us. 



II 

I turn now to the reverse side of Christ's 
teaching concerning the future. And let us not 
seek to hide from ourselves the fact that there is 
a reverse side. For, ignore it as we may, the fact 
remains : those same holy lips which spoke of a 
place, "where neither moth nor rust doth con- 
sume," spoke likewise of another place, " where 
their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." 

In considering this solemn matter we must 
learn to keep wholly separate from it a number 
of difficult questions which have really nothing 
to do with it — with which, indeed, we have 
nothing to do — and the introduction of which 
can only lead to mischievous confusion and error. 
What is to become of the countless multitudes in 
heathen lands who die without having so much as 
heard of Christ 1 How will God deal with those 
even in our own Christian land to whom, at least 
as it seems to us, this life has brought no adequate 



248 The Teaching of Jesus 

opportunity of salvation ? What will happen in 
that dim twilight land betwixt death and judg- 
ment which men call " the intermediate state " ? 
Will they be few or many who at last will be for 
ever outcasts from the presence of God? These 
are questions men will persist in asking, but the 
answer to which no man knows. Strictly speak- 
ing, they are matters with which we have nothing 
to do, which we must be content to leave with 
God, confident that the Judge of all the earth will 
do right, even though He does not show us how. 
What we have to do with, what does concern us, 
is the warning of Jesus, emphatic and reiterated, 
that sin will be visited with punishment, that 
retribution, just, awful, inexorable, will fall on all 
them that love and work iniquity. 

" But why," it may be asked, " why dwell upon 
these things ? Is there not something coarse and 
vulgar in this appeal to men's fears ? And, after 
all, to what purpose is it ? If men are not won 
by the love of God, of what avail is it to speak to 
them of His wrath ? " But fear is as real an 
element in human nature as love, and when our 
aim is by all means to save men, it is surely 
legitimate to make our appeal to the whole man, 
to lay our fingers on every note — the lower 
notes no less than the higher — in the wide gamut 
of human life. The preacher of the gospel, 
moreover, is left without choice in the matter. 
It is no part of his business to ask what is the 
use of this or of that in the message given to him 



Concerning the Future Life 249 

to deliver ; it is for him to declare " the whole 
counsel of God," to keep back nothing that has 
been revealed. And the really decisive con- 
sideration is this — that this is a matter on which 
Christ Himself has .spoken, and spoken with 
unmistakable clearness and emphasis. Shall, 
then, the ambassador hesitate when the will of 
the King is made known ? More often — five 
times more often, it is said ^ — than Jesus spoke 
of future blessedness did He speak of future 
retribution. The New Testament is a very 
tender book ; but it is also a very stern book, 
and its sternest words are words of Jesus. " For 
the sins of the miserable, the forlorn, the friend- 
less, He has pity and compassion ; but for the 
sins of the well-taught, the high- placed, the rich, 
the self-indulgent, for obstinate and malignant 
sin, the sin of those who hate, and deceive, and 
corrupt, and betray, His wrath is terrible, its 
expression is unrestrained." ^ " Jesu, Thou art all 
compassion," we sometimes sing ; but is it really 
so? St. Paul writes of "the meekness and 
gentleness of Christ " ; and for many of the 
chapters of Christ's life that is the right head- 
line ; but there are other chapters which by no 
possible manipulation can be brought under that 
heading, and they also are part of the story. It 
was Jesus who said that in the day of judgment 
it should be more tolerable for even Tyre and 

* See T. G. Selby's Ministry of the Lord Jesus ^ p. 279. 
• R. W. Church, Human Life and its Conditions^ p. 103. 



250 The Teaching of Jesus 

Sidon than for Bethsaida and Chorazin ; it was 
Jesus who uttered that terrible twenty -third 
chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, with its seven 
times repeated " Woe unto you, scribes and Phari- 
sees, hypocrites ! " it was Jesus who spoke of the 
shut door and the outer darkness, of the worm 
that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched, 
of the sin which hath never forgiveness, neither 
in this world, nor in that which is to come, and 
of that day when He who wept over Jerusalem 
and prayed for His murderers and died for the 
world will say unto them on His left hand, 
' Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the eternal 
fire which is prepared for the devil and his 
angels." These are His words, and it is because 
they are His they make us tremble. He is 
"gentle Jesus, meek and mild" ; that is why His 
sternness is so terrible. 

These things are not said in order to defend 
any particular theory of future punishment — on 
that dread subject, indeed, the present writer has 
no "theory" to defend; he frankly confesses 
himself an agnostic — but rather to claim for the 
solemn fact of retribution a place in our minds 
akin to that which it held in the teaching of our 
Lord. We need have no further concern than to 
be loyal to Him. Does, then, such loyalty admit 
of a belief in universal salvation ? Is it open to 
us to assert that in Christ the whole race is pre- 
destined to " glory, honour, and immortality " ? 
The " larger hope " of the universalist — 



Concerning the Future Life 251 

" that good shall fall 
At last — far off — at last, to all, 
And every winter change to spring " — 

is, indeed, one to which no Christian heart can be 
a stranger ; yearnings such as these spring up 
within us unbidden and uncondemned. But 
when it is definitely and positively asserted that 
'' God has destined all men to eternal glory, irre- 
spective of their faith and conduct," " that no 
antagonism to the Divine authority, no insensi- 
bility to the Divine love, can prevent the eternal 
decree from being accomplished," we shall do well 
to pause, and pause again. The old doctrine of- 
an assured salvation for an elect few we reject 
without hesitation. But, as Dr. Dale has pointed 
out,^ the difference between the old doctrine and 
the new is merely an arithmetical, not a moral 
difference : where the old put " some," the new 
puts " all " ; and the moral objections which are 
valid against the one are not less valid against 
the other also. I dare not say to myself, and 
therefore I dare not say to others, that, let a man 
live as he may, it yet shall be well with him in 
the end. The facts of experience are against it ; 
the words of Christ are against it. " The very 
conception of human freedom involves the possi- 
bility of its permanent misuse, of what our Lord 
Himself calls ' eternal sin,' " If a man can go on 
successfully resisting Divine grace in this life, 

^ In a striking article entitled "The Old Antinomianism and 
the New" {Congregational Revieiv, Jan. 1887). 



252 The Teaching of Jesus 

what reason have we for supposing that it would 
suddenly become irresistible in another life ? 
Build what we may on the unrevealed mercies 
of the future for them that live and die in the 
darkness of ignorance, let us build nothing for 
ourselves who are shutting our e}es and closing 
our hearts to the Divine light and 1 ve which are 
already ours. 

" Behold, then, the goodness and severity of 
God ;" and may His goodness lead us to repent- 
ance, that His severity we may never know. This 
is, indeed, His will for every one of us : He has 
" appointed us not unto wrath, but unto the 
obtaining of salvation through our Lord Jesus 
Christ." If we are lost we are suicides. 



THE END 



DEC 5" 1903 



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